Freeman Sequels Volume I: Boldly Going?
by Basara549
Summary: Set 5 years after the events of "The Freeman Chronicles", this is the story of the first intentional extra-dimensional mission of the Freeman clan. Beginning of a set of events that will culminate in the later fanfics "The Skygate Cycle" and "Tales of Nazgul Squadron", set over ten years later. Has sideways connections to other volumes occurring in same time period.
1. Chapter 1

Author's note: While technically labeled the first sequel, this story and the others I will be posting over the next few months have a lot of overlap. For example, the first parts of "The End of the Innocence" and "The Many Loves of Steven Freeman take place" predate this story, or might even take place during this one (from a different point of view). However, these others are really just collections of intertwined short stories, while this story is more continuous (and, truthfully, the original draft of this predates the writing of the others by 15-25 years, so in terms of writing, it was the first). As I'm still working on the others (and revising this one), I'll be posting this one in sections, 1-2 every few weeks.

 **Boldly Going...?**

The First Voyage of the Dreamweaver

By: Stan Bundy

(Note: Some parts of this story will seem to wander off into odd expositions on Robotech history, that don't seen relevant to the plotline. While they aren't immediately relevant, the events discussed ARE important to the events of the "Tales of Nazgul Squadron" story, as most of these discussions of Robotech history 1999-2022 in here directly impact the events in that universe. Think of it as potential foreshadowing for a universe I hope one day to chronicle...)

2041 (Home universe, departing)

"Activate Fold Engines!" Scott Freeman ordered from the command chair.

"Yes, sir!"

The Dreamweaver crew felt the odd, pulsing, sensation associated with a fold come over them, then stabilize into something similar but obviously different, as the fold broke through the dimensional barrier.

"Noel, what's our status?"

"Between realities. It should last about a minute, before we break into the destination, wherever that might be, unless there's other variables other than going from similar points in different universes."

Several minutes passed.

"Well, I guess our destination isn't close to where we launched from."

"Any idea in which variables?"

"It's hard to tell - time variables tend to also include variables in other directions, due to the expansion of the universe, and the motion of the galaxy, the sun itself, and Earth's orbit. Your trip twenty-five years ago had both."

"Captain, we have preliminary indications that we are about to defold," Aurora reported from her station.

"Sound the defold alarm. Everyone, be prepared for anything - we're arriving into a totally unknown situation."

The ship lurched, and all kinds of unexpected alarms were going off.

"Sco- I mean, Captain!" Dana yelled from over at the sensor and weapons stations. "We're in an atmosphere! Altitude 1500 meters above ground; our station-keeping drives have kicked in, so we'll be in hover by 1000 meters. Air speed is about 2500 kph, dropping quickly from air resistance and braking."

"Drives are at full stop," Aurora reported. "Altitude above ground one thousand three hundred meters and stabilizing. Speed relative to the ground will reach stationary hover in six seconds. I'm glad we have inertial stabilizers."

"Temperature is ten degrees Celsius at ground level," Noel called in from her station. "Winds are strong from the southwest. Atmosphere conditions consistent with Earth in winter or high-latitude locations."

"Scott- Captain - Oh, the hell with rank!" Dana stumbled verbally. " Scott, I'm reading indications of a battle, twenty-five kilometers to the northwest."

"Can you identify the combatants?"

"One second..." Dana took one look at the optical zoom, and dropped her lightpen.

"Diverting emergency capacitors to main guns. Helm, come around to 300 degrees. Angie, target the southern target, and fire two seconds after the northern target fires!"

"Yes, Ma'am!"

"What is this - a mutiny?"

"No time to explain -"

"What the hell's going on up there?" Louie called up from the engine room. "Someone just charged the weapons!"

"Dana, the northern ship fired."

"GIVE THEIR TARGET BOTH BARRELS! FIRE!"

Twin beams of destruction lanced out from the ship, converging on their target, which was little more than a dot on the horizon. That dot glowed momentarily, then vanished, stripped down to component atomic nuclei and free electrons, that created a secondary explosion as the nuclei recaptured the electrons as the cloud cooled. A cheer went up from the weapons & security stations, until Scott turned to them and glared.

"Now, Major Sterling, would you explain to me just what or who we just blew into atoms, or are you going to save it for your court martial?"

"Captain," Bowie interrupted; "We've got three bogies approaching us from the northwest, and they're hailing us. How do you wish me to respond."

"Does it have any bearing on what just happened?"

"Uh, I guess you could say so, sir." Bowie tried to stifle a chuckle.

"Very well. Put them on the main screen."

"This is Captain Rick Hunter of the Robotech Defense Force. Identify your ship, please."

"Oh, great. Dana, I guess you had to act quick, didn't you?"

"Excuse me?" Rick asked, having caught the aside.

"Sorry about that, Captain Hunter. One of my crew ordered the destruction of Khyron's ship on her own initiative, once she realized where and when we were, and when you hailed us, I was in the process of reprimanding her for not telling me why she was ordering weapons fire within seconds after our arrival. In fact, she's someone near and dear to your wingmen. Dana, say hi to your parents."

"Dana?" Max asked, startled.

"Hi, Dad, Mom;" Dana replied sheepishly, like she was a little kid caught with her hand in a candy jar. "Well, technically, you're the dimensional analogue of my parents. Come aboard, and we can explain it all to you. You can meet my sisters, and your mothers-in-law."

"Mothers-in-law?"

"Yeah, all three of them. And, wait till you find out who two of them are married to..."

As the three Skull Squadron pilots came aboard, the ship's rescue teams were rushing to their stations, to launch rescue missions and firefighting forces to help in New Macross. One of the first ships would return with the SDF-1 bridge crew, leaving behind power armor teams to board the SDF-2 to rescue survivors. The latter hadn't been fully functional when the first shot from Khyron's ship hit the SDF-1 with a glancing blow, which dealt the SDF-2 an unexpected double blow. Not only did the impact knock the SDF-1 back into its unfinished sister ship, the concussion from the remainder of the weapon impacting the waters of the lake broke the keel of the ship under construction. While Lisa and her command crew managed to escape down one of the few docking trunks to the SDF-1, most of the rest of the crew was trapped in sealed compartments, with the ship flooding from multiple tears in the hull. Luckily, ships made to travel in space had were compartmentalized and had ample survival shelters, and they could protect from flooding as easily as they did from decompression.

While they waited for Gloval, Grant and the others to arrive, Scott and some of the others gave them a brief explanation of just what the Dreamweaver was, and its capabilities. Of course, Dana introduced herself and her younger sister to her parents' analogues, and unleashed the promised bombshell about Miriya's genetic ancestry.

As the three had landed on the closest primary flight crew level to the bridge, they took Rick, Max and Miriya down to the simulator room, and set them up in simulated Valkyries. The first couple of rounds of simulated combat were easy, going up against analogues of the 2020-era REF ground mecha & Zentraedi pods, and the ASC battloids of the Masters' War. Rick was the first to go down in the next wave of simulations, against simulated bioroids. After that point, they shifted out of the VF-1s into Alphas, and after a few minutes of familiarization against the Bioroids (which would have been easy prey for the TASC, had they used Alphas as originally planned), were thrown headlong into an Invid swarm attack. Miriya's prior experience against the Invid helped initially, but soon betrayed her as she ran into the higher Invid types that her counterpart from the Freemans' universe did not encounter until the fight for the Sentinel Worlds. Max then stood alone for the last scenario, which would be against a piloted simulation, instead of one driven by an AI.

"Hey, you're cheating!" He commented, as the fight commenced, and he found himself in close quarters combat against a figment of his geek childhood. "How am I supposed to use this missile hog in a Minovsky environment?"

"Think of this as your version of 'Kobayashi Maru', Lieutenant Commander," Noel replied from her simulator cockpit, which was controlling a white mecha with pink and purple highlights. She was also operating a number of remotely operated and independently-flying cannon in the simulation, that she was controlling with her telemechanical powers, allowing her to approximate the "real" ability of the anime mecha and its pilot. "You'd be worse off using the Valk's slugthrower; at least the Alpha has a plasma rifle and integral inertial compensators."

With that, she slipped several of the funnels around behind him, and caught him in a crossfire that even he couldn't dodge. "Having a pure time, yet?" she kidded, as she popped open the simulator hatch.

" 'Everyone's a noble mind', my ass... Did you just pull that out of television history, or have you ran into that universe?"

"Actually, you're our first stop, and not actually planned as such," Scott replied. "But, we're hoping to find that universe eventually - hopefully early enough along to prevent most of the stupidity from both sides. With, luck, our active stealth systems will allow us to steer some events away from the catastrophes that hit over and over."

"So, how much in control of that simulation were you, miss-?"

"Doctor Noel Tyler; Major Tyler when I'm actually in uniform, but that's in the RDF Reserve Forces. As for your question, a combination of environmental factors, Protoculture exposure, and manipulation by extradimensional entities gave those of us with Zentraedi ancestry powers that can dwarf those of the Tomino Newtypes. I'm one of the most powerful ones, able to do things that would probably stagger your mind, though the vast majority have little more than limited telepathy with each other and the ability to sense imminent danger. And, yes, I probably could control funnels natively with their technology, as easily as I was able to do by mentally interfacing with the simulator."

"Zentraedi ancestry; would Dana-"

"Yes, she has the potential, and in my universe she was targeted for it by a madman who thought he could somehow take it from her, for himself. She didn't even know she had that potential, until he made the attempt. Ironically, in his failure, he made her even stronger. Eventually, the changes started spreading into the non-Zentraedi population, though in doing so it seemed to grow more powerful in those of us with the original potential. Dana's younger sister Aurora, that you met earlier, is almost on my power level; and so is Aurora's husband, who is my nephew, and stayed home from the mission to take care of their daughter."

"It would seem that your family and your counterparts of my family are close, from the way you talk so familiarly about Dana."

"In effect, you're family. My mother and Miriya share some genetic ancestry from the program that created the Zentraedi, and my parents were in Skull Squadron under your counterpart's command, after Rick got promoted to a more administrative position following the recovery from the disaster we just averted. Dana and I were raised together from 2017, up until we both joined the military in Twenty-Eight, and she was my unit commander from Twenty-Nine through the end of the last war in Thirty-Five."

"You don't look that old, or old enough to have a nephew marry Dana's little sister."

"There were extenuating circumstances; I appeared older than I really was when Dana & I grew up together, but my husband jokes that I've not visibly aged in the last ten years. And, since he's a doctor, his comment is based partly on professional opinion. But, at least Dana and I aged reasonably normally. I was actually a clone of another hybrid, whose true nature had to be kept hidden - even from me. She aged from infancy to Dana's age in six months, then to adulthood almost overnight, like some sort of freaky manga character or mythological goddess. My slow aging might be from her genetics, as she didn't age appreciably for almost twenty years, or from my being cloned, since Zentraedi age slowly anyway.

"Most of the early human-Zentraedi crossbreeds died from starvation, war, bigotry, or genetic issues. We were the only ones of our kind born before the Malcontent War of the late Teens, that lived to see the Thirties. Those born in the Twenties and Thirties, on the colonies or the SDF-3 mission, aged more rapidly to adulthood. My nephew and Dana's little sister are college graduates with a daughter, and look in their twenties, but aren't even teenagers yet by the calendar. Trust me, my parents and your dimensional counterparts freaked when they found out their ten-year-olds were having a baby, even if the parents-to-be were physically and emotionally more mature than you and Miriya were when you had Dana."

"Wow..."

"Yeah, the Earth I come from has undergone some radical changes - we'll elaborate on that more when the admiral and Captain Hayes get here; oh, and be prepared - that same 'older sister' that made me as a clone of her, also cloned Dana, and that clone of Dana eventually married the commander of this mission; my uncle.

"As for us in the younger generation, Dana and I got thrust from our graduation ceremony from the Robotech Academy directly into a war, as the creators of the Zentraedi, the Robotech Masters, arrived to blockade Earth from orbit during the ceremony. They wanted the Protoculture Matrix that Zor hid aboard the SDF-1, that the RDF never found.

"That war eventually ended over the buried ruins of New Macross, with both sides destroyed, and Dana one of the few surviving officers. About a year later, the aliens that the Masters stole the secret to Protoculture from arrived, and enslaved the population of Earth for four years, before the forces that left with the SDF-3 returned, and we convinced them they'd become as much the monsters that they believed the Masters to be - though it was a close-run thing, to paraphrase Churchill. The civilian leadership of the SDF-3 mission had grown corrupt, and as self-centered, much as how the pre-Dolza EarthGov that refused to listen to Gloval's reports of the true situation with the Zentraedi. More so, actually, as they were willing to destroy all life on Earth to try to destroy the Invid, since they were safe on the Masters' homeworld."

"That sounds really bad; Were those the Invid we fought before you joined in?"

"Yeah, you've probably heard Miriya occasionally mention them in passing, but most Zentraedi refused to talk about them to people on Earth, prior to the Expeditionary Force encountering them on the SDF-3 mission, as a leftover part of their control programming. The Masters didn't want their soldiers accidentally steering any dissidents towards possibly allying with the Invid against them - which was funny, because the Invid accepted no one that had any association with the Masters as allies, only as slaves. We've sent a message up to Breetai's ship, asking him and Exedore to come to the Dreamweaver, because we really need to talk to all of you about what to avoid in the next few decades."

"If what you have said so far is just a little of the story, I guess it's going to be a really long night."

"That, it will. As it is, I need to get down to sickbay. My doctorate is officially in something other than medicine, but being married to a doctor, I ended up with lots of field medic experience in the Invid War, and ended up getting a secondary degree after the war. It also helps that part of my portfolio of paranormal powers are things that diagnose ailments, close wounds, speed healing, purge diseases and poisons, and even do some forms of surgery with my bare hands. I have the feeling I'm going to appreciate my ability to get a full night's rest in a couple hours, after treating wounded the rest of the evening."

Late that night, Scott, Marie, and Rem were still trying to explain their bizarre history to an entranced Henry Gloval, Lisa Hayes, Rick Hunter, Max & Miriya Sterling, and Exedore. Eventually, Breetai also arrived, a micronian for the first time in his existing memory, followed by Emil Lang and Claudia Grant, both of whom had been caught up in rescue operations until others came in and insisted on relieving them. Once these last three arrived, Scott went back over some of the things already discussed, and they started discussing the really complex matters, like the Masters, the Invid, and the Haydonites.

Noel and Dana had returned during the discussion of the Malcontent wars, but as it turned to the battles between the Masters & the Armies of the Southern Cross, the memories became more and more painful. When Dana's wrist communicator sounded, requesting her return to Ship Security, she quickly used the call to excuse herself. However, when she returned during the discussion of the Invid's arrival on Earth, she seemed to be embarrassed by something more than her reaction to the memories.

"Dana, what's wrong?" Marie asked.

"Sis, do you remember when I did our security scan before we engaged the fold drive? Well, it turns out there was a hole in our scan systems - the stealth systems on our mecha and shuttles can be activated when still in the hangar. That security call was from our stowaways turning themselves in."

"You're joking, right?" Scott asked. "So, who snuck aboard?"

"Let me put it this way; this isn't the first time she's done something this crazy, but this time she brought the husband and daughters along."

"Where are they at this moment?" Scott was certain he knew who it was, from the hint.

"In the hall, waiting. They said they were told to come, and to deliver a message."

"MINMEI! GET IN HERE!" Scott yelled at the open door. "And bring Kyle - I want to know how you roped him into this. He's usually not this rash."

"So, they reconciled in your universe?" Rick asked.

"Yes, but it was a long, strange road," Marie leaned over to Rick and answered, with a sigh. "He literally disappeared from public records for nearly fifteen years, although I met him and indirectly found out who he was in 2017. In his new life, he was an occasional pilot for Doctor Lang's personal craft and even test piloted a couple of prototypes - at least officially. Unofficially, he was Emil's personal bodyguard, and went on the SDF-3 mission - in part to finally break all ties with his former life - not realizing that Minmei would make a rash move to join the mission after launch. Minmei, on the other hand, had a long, slow descent into the dark side of fame, having several bad romances, the last with a traitor that allied with an alien foe of humanity with the intent of using them to kill the REF leadership - namely, you and Lisa. He planned to then turn on the aliens to become the conquering hero and leader by proclamation. When this came close to occurring, Kyle broke his cover, and ALMOST saved her."

"What do you mean, 'almost'?"

"He died trying, right in front of her. But, thanks to Karen and me, he got better, and helped in her eventual rescue. You can talk to them more about it with them after Scott's done - if he doesn't lock them up." By this time, the Lynn family had filed in, and were standing against the far wall.

"Scott, we're sorry for stowing away, but it wasn't exactly our idea," Minmei apologized. "It was actually relayed to us from your favorite niece, through little Karen."

"So, on the word of a two year old, you stowed away on my ship?"

"Well, it was too specific to be the work of a child," Kyle added, in his defense. "She told us all to come, and exactly where to hide to not be detected by the security sensors. We've been hiding there, until we got the word through our daughter to come out and report to you. Seeing who you're talking to, I can see why now was the time."

"Oh, wonderful," Scott moaned, eyes raising to the ceiling in a classic "Why, me?" stare.

"General Freeman," Admiral Gloval interrupted. "I've noticed that so far, you've been purposely vague about this niece that has come up several times in our discussions with you. Perhaps now would be a good time to explain just who and what she is."

"Well, Admiral, she is hard to describe. Noel, here, is a slightly altered clone of Karen, made by Karen to conceal the fact that she'd inexplicably aged from childhood to adulthood during her escape from the labs of a mad scientist that had kidnapped her and Dana for experiments concerning their half-alien nature. My wife Marie, in turn, was a clone of Dana that Karen made to keep herself company in her attempt to establish some semblance of a new identity, and to safeguard their little sisters from further exploitation.

"Noel's paranormal abilities are roughly equivalent to Karen's power level circa Twenty-thirty, but appear to be at their natural maximum, far below what Karen showed in the final liberation of Earth in 'Thirty-five. Dana & Marie's powers are about the level Noel's were when her powers were awakened in 'Thirty. All three of the latter had their powers reach their current level, as the result of some sort of manipulation by Karen as she departed for dimensions unknown.

"To give a good example of Noel's current power level, one experiment that she's done involved flying a mated Alpha-Beta Veritech pair to the Lagrange point between the Earth and the Moon, then channeling most of her power into creating a fold effect to take her and the twenty-ton tandem mecha to our colony world in the Epsilon Eridani system, faster than a technological fold would take. Granted, in doing so, she severely fatigued herself, and had a fever spike of over a degree Celsius as a result. She had to wait a half-hour to recover, and rehydrate, before using the small fold system built into the Beta to fold back, on autopilot. That's Noel. Karen, on the other hand, was probably at least the power level of the Invid Regis, who was quite literally the mother goddess of that race, and the two actually departed Earth together - taking the entire Invid race with them."

"My God."

"That's about the truth of the matter, though she never claimed to be a goddess. She led us by the nose enough through the war with the Invid, to qualify for the Greco-Roman pantheon. She left a book explaining why she didn't rush the war to a quicker conclusion, in order to let the Invid realize their error, and their own humanity, on their own, but that idea isn't too popular with the people back home, as it means that a lot of people died that she might have been able to save, by attempting to intervene."

"That's not entirely fair," Noel interjected. "The other-dimensional entity that gave her some foresight into the events of the war, had no way of knowing what the ramifications would have been by forcing the issue. Trying to stop the initial invasion, in progress, might have led to genocidal fighting worse than what she inferred would have occurred without intervention. She did reduce casualties, but mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere, since the events she felt she had to let take their course were confined to the Americas. She even helped save half of the Mars attack wave, that would have died otherwise - although in doing so she ended up arranging for us to kill about the same number of Invid that those people would have taken out in their fight to the death. That's not even getting into the Invid departure, which she said would have killed most of the fleet that kept firing on the Invid as they left, instead of just the command ships and planet-killer weapons that were violating the rules of engagement that the Hunters ordered, but weren't around to enforce."

"So, who were these entities playing God with your lives?" Gloval asked.

"The villain, for all intents and purposes, was a being known as Haydon; I'm sure that name probably has some meaning for Breetai & Exedore - and maybe Doctor Lang, depending on how much he was able to get out of the original computer of the SDF-1." Noel took a deep breath, then continued.

"Haydon's plan was to drive the evolution of various races forward, seeking a way to use one of them to manipulate his own evolution into a god-like being. Along the way, he also figured out that under the right conditions, he could manipulate a singularity to create a space-time bubble in the null-space between dimensions - a nascent universe where he would be god-like in reality, not just figuratively. The only problem was that he had no way of crossing over to that infant universe without something forcing a doorway open. Then, he rediscovered the Invid – a race he'd originally help create, but had left behind to its own devices.

"The Invid had the potential, he just had to steer them to the pinnacle of their evolution, then trick them into using the power of their merged race to open the portal. Once on the other side, his knowledge of what was there would allow him to get an upper hand, and wrest control before the Invid could defend themselves. His actions were in many ways a paradox, as the future version of himself that succeeded in his plan sent him back the child pawn to place into the decadent Tyrolean society, to influence into furthering the Invid's evolution, by putting them under extreme duress. That child was his universe's Zor."

"And that led to Protoculture, and then to the SDF-1," Exedore reasoned.

"And from there, the events we interrupted today, which unchecked would have destroyed both ships in New Macross, plus adding the wreckage of Khyron's vessel to the mess, while rendering the city uninhabitable. Construction of a replacement ship would have taken only three years, had not a series of guerrilla wars broken out between those Zentraedi that refused to assimilate, and those manipulating human society to make assimilation more difficult. The ship would launch instead in seven years, arriving after a much longer fold than should have occurred, as certain factors we'll discuss later sabotaged the research for calculating optimum fold conditions. The late arrival placed your older selves in a war of liberation to free the Masters' homeworld and its closest former client worlds from the Invid Regent, while the Masters attacked a weakened Earth, and were destroyed by a clone of Zor even as they rendered Earth totally vulnerable to the Invid.

"One thing to note is that, near as we can tell, my father and his siblings were at best background players, possibly even killed, in the original universe I describe. Most certainly, no counterpart of me or Karen existed, and what my sister related to us makes Dana glad that she wasn't her counterpart from that world. Everything progressed up to the Invid departure, in a much more bloody war than what we experienced.

"The Invid energy being was lured to the singularity, and accidentally dragged the SDF-3, whose fold systems were again malfunctioning, with it. In there, Haydon got his wish, but not before the REF managed to escape his clutches through crude manipulation of the forces in that realm; Haydon used two of the passengers of the SDF-3 to create the infant Zor that he sent back in time. This would seem to be the end of the story, but what happened after that, was that the two captives convinced Haydon to return their son to them, since Haydon was done with him - and after all, the son had done so much in pursuit of emulating Haydon.

"Zor, when reborn with the memories of his life on Tyrol and as a clone on Earth, was a lot less pleased with the situation, especially after meeting his parents. In many ways, he ended up playing a 'Lucifer' role to Haydon's self-styled godhood - or, perhaps more accurately, a 'Prometheus', standing up for the mortal species. He tricked Haydon into a battle for dominance of the dimension, realizing that Haydon's growing boredom would soon lead him to further manipulations.

"The battle would be in three alternate timelines, of which we represent one. Part of our mission plan is to attempt to locate one of the others, that we made contact with in the incident that resulted in Karen's birth. Karen was meant as a wild card. Zor created her to ensure that someone would stand up against Haydon, should he fail - and be much less predictable than he was, given how manipulated he himself had been by Haydon."

"And, Zor and Karen won, otherwise we wouldn't be here," Marie said, taking over at this point, to let her cousin/niece catch her breath. "Our presence will, of course, split this timeline off from its original course, so if steps are taken to thwart Haydon here, his Zor paradox in the past will be broken if it is like in that older universe, but the act of dimensional twinning that comes from the timeline divergence will compensate. What we have been told about other-dimensional intersection by Karen is that you can only get timeline alteration by messing with your own timeline directly, and the metaphysics involved with dimension travel makes that nearly impossible to do so intentionally - accidents and intervention by deific beings, on the other hand, are another matter."

"How long do you intend to stay here, since this wasn't one of your intended targets?" Gloval asked.

"As long as you need us; we're not so cold-hearted as to abandon you in your time of need, to pursue our own desires. Besides, with a little foreknowledge, we can help you avoid some of the dangers of the future. For example, there's a person, currently not in uniform because he's believed dead, that you'll need to make sure he never gets back into uniform in the RDF."

"And that is?"

"Thomas Riley Edwards. He was part of the original SDF-1 wreckage insertion team with you and Roy Fokker, as a representative of the Neasians. He was originally planned to be the air group commander for the SDF-1, having developed political friends among the UEDC command council. In fact, he missed the launch, from being at Alaska Base in conference with some of his buddies when Breetai forced the premature launch, and after the SDF-1 returned, he thought it was suicide to try to assume that role."

"And I was glad to give Fokker his position, at launch, as Roy had been my first choice for CAG, but was overruled, in the spirit of detente with our former adversaries. You say Edwards is still alive?"

"Yes; he was one of two survivors of Alaska Base deep command; yes, Rick, Lisa wasn't the only person to survive down there. Edwards hated Roy with a passion; Roy had bested him several times in dogfights in the Global War, though neither ever got a conclusive shootdown of the other; the closest was Edwards ejecting rather than trying to land a crippled craft. It took Edwards weeks to escape from that smoking hole in the ground. While he already had a nasty facial scar from where Roy blew a cockpit out with a near miss, he had more massive injuries including loss of an eye in the Cannon complex, but not before seeing Rick and Lisa flying out of the Cannon together, and their being too concerned with each other to notice his attempts to get their attention. So, as a result, he hates you two more than he ever hated Roy, and in our timeline made several attempts on your life through intermediaries prior to the SDF-3 mission. Once on the mission, he manipulated the civilian component of the mission to get you removed from command and him placed in charge, all the while colluding with the Invid Regent to try to get your detached force killed."

"But, has he done anything yet to bring on punishment? We can hardly try him for actions of a dimensional counterpart."

"From his not reporting in, you should at least be able to hold him on desertion. He's been an advisor for the Southern Cross regional militia for over a year, so he had ample opportunity. As for pre-Zentraedi charges, you might want to question him about how he helped the anti-UN forces get access to the shuttle that was used to send up the hijackers that commandeered the Oberth-class vessel that killed the Mars Base personnel. The RDF and Southern Cross didn't find out about his connections to that until after his next apparent death, from documents discovered by the Neo-Soviets in the 2020s. By that time, he was on the other side of the universe, and well into his third life in de-facto charge of the REF - and he and his allies on Earth controlled interstellar communications to the point they made sure that 99% of people thought that something was jamming communications between the two. The truth of what was going on in respect to communications only became clear with his desertion in the face of his crimes in 2028, and flight to Invid-controlled space. Communications were only fully restored shortly after emergency missions had been launched back to Earth, since one of our reconditioned Zentraedi vessels had to make an emergency fold to escape being co-opted by the Masters' automated control systems, and found it easier to link up with the REF than try to return to Earth."

This revelation sent a cold chill through those that had first-hand experience with the event that had so shook Earth's early defenses, where one of the first three Oberth class vessels had been hijacked, used to destroy another (which had the crew of Mars Base Sara on it, as the original intent of the hijacking was to destroy the base), and was then destroyed by the Oberth itself, under the command of Gloval. Not only was this one of the worst memories of Gloval's life (as many of the captured ship's engineering crew were still alive, as hostages), it was also how Lisa's fiancé Karl Riber died, aboard the ship destroyed by the terrorists. Hearing that not only had one of their own been responsible, but in the Freeman's universe escaped punishment for it, and eventually attacked their counterparts as well, was a bit much to bear.

"Do you know where the Russians found that information?"

"One of the old Neasian redoubts; I'm sure we can find the exact location in our computers later, if you want to recover the information."

"Do it, please," Gloval asked. "You say the Russians eventually go back to a Soviet-style government, independent of the UEG?"

"Yes; really, the framework is already in place, and the Russians, perhaps more than a little rightly, think that they are getting short shrift from the recovery effort, since the more intact Western Hemisphere is getting higher priority, since it was already the world's breadbasket before Dolza," Noel explained. "The state is already the main driving force, in the semi-permanent disaster your world currently is in. Social structures are in flux, and will be as long as the planet is recovering. Our world, almost 30 years further along than yours, is just now starting to denationalize some aspects of industry, though truthfully we're only 7 years beyond an alien occupation of Earth.

"It took ten years for civilian industry to take off again after the Zentraedi, and most of that was destroyed either by the Masters or Invid by 2031. Odds are some things, like critical care medicine, might remain nationalized, but much like medicine before it went corporate, it's a calling once more, not a job - and a military one at that. Civilian doctors tended to be too-easy targets, and most of the pre-Dolza doctors that didn't enter uniform got themselves killed thinking that their status would protect them as it did in the Global War. Another factor is that the military had the most intact post-bachelors educational structure, and all doctors had to be trained in battlefield medicine, as neither Zentraedi nor most outlaws cared if civilians got hurt; even our pediatricians and OB/GYNs have to be trained to deal with amputations and sucking chest wounds. The final factor is that many of the high-end medical resources, like the cloning and sizing chamber technology we modified to do limb regeneration and gene therapy, are national security threats if in the wrong hands - today's events proved that.

"By the way, if you wish to stop by the medical bay later, Commander Breetai, we can give you back a fully functional eye and undamaged face - and the eye can be a prosthetic that sizing chambers will alter as needed, and have all the functionality of your current one, while appearing like a biologic eye. In fact, the only reason why we have that technology is because your counterpart wanted it instead of a biologic replacement."

"I'll consider your offer for later; for now, let's get back to the discussion of the near-future as it transpired on your world."

"Speaking of that," Rick spoke up; "Lisa and I need to deal with something back in town. Can we get a ride back to New Macross soon?"

"Rick, if you wish, we can take care of that for you," Kyle spoke up, from the back of the room that he and his family and moved to, after the subject shifted away from their unauthorized presence aboard the ship. "Maybe seeing the two of us together will make the pain easier."

"Minmei is at your house, isn't that right?" Claudia asked Rick.

"Yeah. Strangely, when she showed up on Christmas, it was almost like we were back trapped in the engine room again, only instead of being interrupted on kissing by a construction accident, we moved to the couch to sit together, and she passed out before anything could happen. I ended up calling Lena over to change her and put her to bed, and I slept on the couch - like I have for the last week."

"I remember part of that," Minmei commented. "At least, waking up in your bed in the middle of the night, in one of your shirts and my underwear, and not having an idea how I got in that condition. I got up, and found you starting to shiver on the couch, where your blanket had almost fallen into the floor. I tucked you back in and went back to bed. I wasn't really in love with you, but the idea of having you. It took all those years of throwing myself into my music, and making all those bad decisions Scott and the others probably already told you about, to come to that realization.

"After all, Rick was my first love, and you know the power of that, Lisa. After I was rescued from Optera, your counterpart and I had a long heart to heart, and she told me all about Riber, and how she almost got herself killed grieving for him on Mars, before our hero Rick swooped down to save you, much like he did to save me from Zentraedi after the SDF-1 launch. He's a knight in shining armor; that's what he is, by nature- and don't you dare blush, Rick Hunter; you know it to be true. Roy might have been the Lancelot of you pilots, Max is Gawain, and poor, dear, Ben was Dagonet - but you were always our Galahad."

"Are you really sure you want to confront her?" Rick asked.

"I have to keep her from repeating my mistakes; I couldn't really live with myself, given this opportunity, if I didn't make the attempt. Besides, I miss that old Chinese restaurant, and that's really the only place we have to take her."

"Yeah;" Kyle added, "So do I, even if they changed the name to the title of that cheesy movie we made. Maybe now that it's not destroyed, we can get them to change it back. I can't wait to see Mother & Father again - especially since there will two Minmeis coming in, plus three grandkids."

"By the way, Kyle," Rick asked, "Where are you, I mean, well, your counterpart, while all of this is happening? Minmei said you walked out a couple days before she showed up at my door, and for once it didn't appear to be the booze talking, when the two of you finished that argument."

"I used what little money I hadn't wasted on salvaged whiskey to catch a flight to New Tokyo. Once there, I started wandering what was left of that land, living on handouts and odd jobs, drying myself out. One day, this funky old man came up to me and offered me a job. Apparently, he'd seen the movie and recognized me. He had me do all kinds of stupid little jobs, to try my patience and will, while straightening me out. It wasn't until spring that I realized he was a martial arts master; a real one, not just a teacher of mechanics like my old teachers. It was then that he'd told me of what almost happened today - and that it was so long ago, by then, that it wasn't really worth going back. He gave me a choice of staying, and continuing to train, or leaving, and never finding him again. I chose to stay, at least for the next 3 years."

"Never finding him again? I sounds like you're saying he was some sort of ninja-"

"He hated that term. The ninja of fiction were based in part on those using his art, but the real name for it is something that one is never to speak to someone not in the clan. When I progressed enough to operate on my own, he told me to seek out Emil Lang, and become his protector. The cagey old bastard figured that Lang, more than anyone else, held the keys to Earth's recovery, and didn't want anything interfering with that. It was actually a lot more accurate than even he would have thought. I managed to actually get the good doctor to agree to put me on his staff, and train me on things I'd never even thought I'd do, back in those days on board the SDF-1 - things like mecha piloting."

"Whatever became of your master?"

"I met a few more students, before the SDF-3 launched; I actually thought I would finally be able to find my way without Minmei occasionally stumbling into my life, where she could blow my cover. Of course, that ended before it could really begin. When I finally made it back to Earth, there wasn't anyone left in central Honshu. I haven't even been able to find any of the other students, either, even those that were in America. But, aren't we wandering off subject, again?"

"That, we are. Let me take it a little further off subject. Lisa, I've been an idiot these last couple months, ever since I had to go play referee in Monument between Kyle and Minmei, and skipped our date. When Khyron attacked, I realized that I might lose you more permanently than you simply flying off on the SDF-2. Would you please forgive me, and marry me?"

"What?" You could have heard a pin drop, from where it came out of the blue. "Will you take down that Minmei poster in your bedroom if I say yes?"

"Hell, I'd eat it, if it means you will say yes," Rick replied with a twinkle in his eye.

"Then, of course, I'll marry you." Lisa turned to Admiral Gloval. "And, of course, Henry, I would be honored if you would give me away."

"Can I be the best man?" someone called from the doorway. Lisa and Claudia both turned, looked, and fainted.

Scott looked at his wife, who shrugged her shoulders, denying any involvement this time. Standing in the doorway was Roy Fokker, looking no older than he did on the day he died; maybe a little younger.

"Relax, uncle;" Noel confessed. "Remember that Roy's body was put into cryo-storage when he died, and got forgotten in all the chaos from Toronto onward. So, he never got buried after the SDF-1 landed, which is how Marie and Karen brought him back on our world. Alex remembered, and had him transferred and ran through the chamber to repair the organ damage from his blood loss. After restoration, bringing him back was easy." After the others were revived, and Roy took a seat, she continued.

"This is a good example of why our healing tech is considered too powerful to put in civilian hands - or most military ones, for that matter, but that genie's been out of the bottle since the Zentraedi were created. As long as the body is only a few hours old, or put into cryogenics within that time frame, and the brain is intact, anyone can be brought back - and really, all we need is the brain; the body is effectively regrown from scratch in the chamber. Nearly everyone you've talked to in this room are either clones, or the child of a clone; Scott's the only one that hasn't had some sort of modification. Even Minmei has had cosmetic surgery via modified sizing chamber technology, which is really just simplified cloning tech.

"As a result, we're at a bit of a quandary. No one has to have any permanent injuries, or health conditions. Only accidents, violence, and some kinds of strokes can cause permanent death, if we can't get them to help on time. And, the big thing that really hasn't crossed the mind yet of the older generations, is that no one has to grow old; at least not permanently, if we can get the Flower of Life crops growing sufficiently to supply the chambers. It's one of the big worries for my fellow doctors, as well as my fellow persons with paranormal abilities, who are naturally long-lived, that when this does become common knowledge, that the demand for anagathic treatments could outstrip supply, and the dangers of someone emulating the Robotech Masters, and judging who can and can't have access to it - or hoarding it for themselves.

"Call it black humor, but some of us working in the Protoculture field refer to it as the 'One Tin Soldier' scenario. There's other ones we talk about, just as worrisome - such as 'Pandora', which is someone getting the cloning tech and samples of our genetic material, and attempting to create an army of psychic super-soldiers, or attempting to uplift sub-sentient species with genetic mods for their own ends. The latter variation, appropriately, is code-named as 'Haydon Junior'."

"I think I understand a little, about what you said about your nieces, General Freeman," Rick commented.

"And, what are the limits you set for yourselves, in your own travels?" Gloval asked. "One of the things that came up during all the discussion of contact missions, before the SDF-1 launch, was the concept of a 'Prime Directive' of non-interference."

"Many of us that survived Dolza were familiar with the fictional setting that concept came from," Scott answered. "Some of us, on examining it, found that the concept got grossly perverted between the version in the Sixties, and the version of the sequels of the Eighties and Nineties. In fact, those sequels often used it as an excuse for allowing natural-occurring genocide to occur, that could have been prevented easily. Many novels set in that universe, some co-written by the stars of the original series, debated the morality of such blind obedience to an order that bore little resemblance to the original directive, or how it was enforced.

"The original version seemed to be 'make no actions that local primitives could detect, that would change their society's evolution towards being a spacefaring race'. There were even a case or two in the 60s episodes where the ship had specific missions to prevent extinction-level asteroid impacts from hitting primitive worlds, long before Earth science even suspected the K-T impact event's existence, or collisions between inhabited worlds. In the sequels, it became 'make no actions that could be detected by any means, even if those means are high technology that the locals won't have for thousands of years - and won't ever have, because the mandated inaction will kill them all in a week'. One novel character even commented something along the lines of 'for something that was so important that it must not be disobeyed under any circumstances, why does it feel so right when someone disobeys it?'

"As a result, we decided to take the moral high road. Simply, it is the belief that when it comes to 'evolution of culture', there is nothing more unchanging and stagnant than a dead culture. So, by definition, 'doing less harm' MUST involve intervening, if the alternative is watching a culture die through inaction.

"And, there's also a factor in the nature of the multiverse, called the 'World as Myth' hypothesis. Essentially, all worlds are both real and fiction; every reality is fiction in some other reality; as a result, all worlds are linked. In addition, the places one can most easily travel to are the ones that you know as fiction, or alternates of ones' own current time or past. Travel to the future, is a bit more problematic, and not so easily done; you're almost certain to end up in an alternate timeline's future, as if you return home, you change your own time with the knowledge you bring back. There's actually a book, that is fiction here, that Emil has in his personal library, that goes a bit into this as its main plot thread..."

"Heinlein's 'The Number of the Beast'," Lang replied, recognizing the reference.

"That's the one," Scott confirmed. "Of course, that means that theoretically we could run into its cast, which can be a good thing or a bad thing - especially if we run into their adversaries. More likely, we'll run into a few more alternates, and some anime and mainstream television science fiction worlds from the 20th century, as most of the crew grew up watching the shows from the DVD collections of the Macross Island residents that became MBS TV staples until the entertainment industry managed to recreate itself a decade from now, and those collections were heavily weighted in that direction.

"On that note, I think we should adjourn this meeting, and let Roy get caught up on the last three years with you all, while the Lynns go take care of that Minmei problem. Admiral, Doctor; you can have access to one of the ship's auxiliary bridges. The controls have been disabled, and all the displays reconfigured to interface remotely with the SDFs' damage control and communications systems, as well as those of the city. And, as for our Zentraedi colleagues, they can go there as well to help coordinate with their forces, or can go down to the medical center and get a full genetic tune-up. After all, you two are the first and third Zentraedi ever created, and both of you had to get some, well, repairs done before the SDF-3 mission in 2021."


	2. Chapter 2

**Mission Day 2:**

On waking, the first thing Scott did was contact the ship's stores, and make sure that all of the overnight guests, including those that barely slept, got changes of clothes. As a matter of protocol, only he, Breetai and Gloval would be in uniform for breakfast, as commanders of their respective forces. Only Exedore had took up the offer of medical treatment overnight, but that was mostly due to Zentraedi fleet regulations concerning disorientation and health issues if you use a chamber too quickly in succession - a flaw that was corrected in the versions designed by Lang, Cabell and Nichols in the 2030s. The current chamber designs were Alex and Noel's modifications from those designs, and surpassed even the grandest designs of the Robotech Masters in scope and possibility - hence, the concerns about making them too easily accessible to persons of lesser conviction.

After placing the clothes orders, and getting his mind back off of chamber technology, he went to check on the children's bedrooms. As usual, despite having separate beds, and insisting that they needed them, the two girls ended up sharing the same bed by morning. Eventually, as they became closer to being teens, they'd probably break the habit; in that regard, it was good that they aged barely different than normal children. In the other room, Steven was asleep, cuddling a Karbarran-style giant teddy bear. Despite not yet being three, he looked closer to eight or nine, and his angelic sleeping face hid the fact that he was easily one of the most powerful child psychics, and was always getting into mischievous situations when not kept on a short leash. The only others on his power level among the minors were his cousin Catherine, and possibly Minmei's youngest; little Karen hadn't been formally tested yet. He hoped that those kids would show a bit more self-restraint than his eldest niece did.

Suddenly, he felt Marie's arms slip around him from behind. He thought she was still in bed, asleep, but she had always been good at sneaking around.

"Scott, I've been meaning to tell you something," she whispered.

"Warn a guy, will you? I could have woke up the kids."

"Well, one of our children isn't asleep; in fact, she woke me up."

"Huh?"

"Our newest one; surprise, hun; we're having another baby. And, don't give me that look - you know as well as I do that it wasn't really the dimensional fold that caused Karen; it just put Kayra where Zor could create Karen more easily, without Haydon realizing what was going on."

"So, how long do we have?"

"About five or six months; Noel says this baby's most likely the same power level as our first two girls, so that's not going to be an issue either. Hopefully, we'll get back home before she's born; after all, since we're not guaranteed to arrive home with the same amount of time having passed there as we've spent out exploring, just how would we record her birthday?"

"Good point. I'll try to help out with that, but do remember that crazy cousin of yours is the one that pre-programmed this trip, and not even Louie wants to mess with that. Now, how about joining me for a shower?"

"That sounds tempting... so, let's get started before these three wake up too..."

Most of what was being referred to already by the locals as "The Day After" consisted of further rescue and salvage operations on the SDF-2, repairs to the SDF-1, and all kinds of relief missions in the city, as the initial salvos from Khyron's ship appeared to randomly target areas of town, just to cause damage was caused in the areas surrounding the crater lake, as the SDF-1 effectively splashed down without helm control after depleting its reserve power in its one shot, and its crash-landing displaced half the water into the surrounding areas of town. In fact, one of the reasons for SDF-1 repairs was that it had landed on the still-incomplete SDF-2 that had been 90% submerged to start with, and the SDF-1 had to be moved, to reach some of the areas that had trapped people. The canal system that had been dug to connect the city's lakes to the Missouri river system for barge traffic had backflowed to refill the crater, and in doing so many cargo barges had got drawn into and sunk in the crater, complicating everything with the potentially volatile mix of the sunken cargoes.

The Dreamweaver remained on station near the city, not quite landing due to its massive size, and using the opportunity to stress test the CG lifters and station-keeping repulsors. Occasionally, it would fly over and use its Praxian and Perytonian tech tractor technology to pull barges and other debris out of the crater, or receive an emergency medical flight. Scott more than once found himself wishing that they'd found one of the Roddenberry-inspired universes first, so they could have acquired their matter transporter technology, as it would have made the rescue and recovery of personnel over in an hour, not still going into its second day. Then again, depending on the time frame of the contact, he might have just been tempted to fire the main guns into a Federation council meeting, steal their tech, and leave.

As most of Louie's on-ship responsibilities were either related to space and dimension travel, or supervisory, he had took it on himself to start using the ship's fabricators to make parts for the two wrecks below. Interestingly, his first items readied were new fold drives for both, using his technology, and taking up less than half the space that the SDF-1's missing unit occupied. As to why he made those, when the ships wouldn't be spaceworthy for weeks, he pointed out that they'd probably want to intercept the Masters while they were still within a year's travel from their departure point, and that, unlike nearly every other part, he didn't have to wait for the specifications needed to patch in the new segments - the SDF-1's drive was gone, and the SDF-2 had been a month from having its drive installed in space (a drive design that, after seven years of modifications, would have been in the SDF-3, and caused all the time-dilation headaches of that mission, that not even the transplanted Zentraedi drives of the colony fleets had).

Scott made sure to reinforce to Gloval and Hayes that he'd keep his ship here, and even go on that mission with them, when the time came. After all, getting to the Masters would be the difficult part, and both Dana and Noel had already been in that control room (which was the same on all the vessels). Zor had, too, but besides the fact that he'd been running in a red haze of vengeance at the time, and not really aware of his surroundings until shocked out of it by Dana, he couldn't teleport.

The plan was to use the three ships' fold systems to get in front of the Masters' ships, which were not using fold engines due to their Protoculture shortage. The Masters would of course pick up the ships on sensors, and recognize the SDF-1 from the Zentraedi reports on the Earth rebuild of Zor's ship. As Zor's ship is their only reason for even being in transit, they'd stop and try to posture. The Dreamweaver's three high-powered psychics (Aurora, Dana and Noel) would be waiting in a cloaked Horizon special ops variant, all three in Cyclones, with a select squad of Cyclone troopers - all of which were Zentraedi or Tiresian. They'd ascertain which of the vessels was the current command ship, board via the bridge's dedicated hangar (which besides the personal craft of the command Triads, also held the escape pod launch equipment that Dana had been ejected with in 2030) after bypassing the alarms, then storm the command center. The three ladies would grab the Master triad, and teleport them back to the Dreamweaver directly as a show of force to their targets, while their escorts would take and hold the remaining sub-commanders, using the "shock factor" of the exfiltration method of the Masters, as well as their own origins, as a means of getting the fleet to stand down.

Of course, the execution of the plan would have to wait until after repairs were done, and there were several weeks of where, besides the usual progress reports and paperwork, the involved command parties had little to do, but talk to Scott and others about the fate they'd just averted, and other trivia.

 **5 February 2014 (local date)  
** _(Arrival +5 weeks)_

"So, tell me why we're using our new, untested, fold engines to transport the three ships to stop the Masters, when you've done full field trials on your fold systems before your first dimensional jump?" Admiral Gloval asked.

He, Scott, Lisa and Exedore were sitting around the main meeting room of the Dreamweaver, the top section of what had once been the command bubble of the Zentraedi ship Korra'ti. It, like the bridge several floor partitions down, had a panoramic view of the park area that was once the full bridge of the ship, and the video screens that still floated above it.

"Because your fold systems are programmed by Emil and Louie; ours have a set of programmed jumps that we didn't program, for cross-dimensional jumps. Jumps that we're not sure we could bypass, even for local fold jumps. It's better to be safe than sorry."

"That imp of a niece of yours, correct?"

"Yes; Louie was quite perturbed when he showed up in the engine room the morning of launch, and found out that not only had she locked in those jumps, she'd done a system upgrade."

"If he's anything like Emil, I can imagine how well he took it."

"Actually, after working with Emil for a decade, Emil's mellowed him out considerably. Back when Louie was just a hovertank driver with a penchant for tinkering every second he wasn't in combat, he developed a new targeting system that he used for a simulator game. A couple of R&D guys saw it, recognized its potential as a new interface between the helmet systems and the aiming controls, and decided to put it into production on a rush basis, for the mecha to be used in the attempted boarding of a Masters' ship. Of course, they lied to him, and told it they just wanted it for training simulators - he was a very naive geek at the time.

When he found out, he attempted to destroy every mecha in his unit, starting with his own. The others had to pull him off, and convince him that the fact that the system targeted the Bioroid pilots, was actually a mercy killing for the semi-sentient clones, as well as for the repeatedly killed-and-cloned leader pilots. And they literally had to step in front of his plasma torch to do it. He REALLY doesn't like people lying to him, or doing things with his tech without permission."

"Since we might have to face them, why were the Bioroids so lacking in soft-kill vulnerabilities? Dana told me that on occasion, the Masters would mind-control their dissidents or even captured civilians, and turn them into pilots."

"The cockpit was the only weak point, since practically every weapon in the Southern Cross inventory by that point was an energy weapon or a kinetic penetrator, and the armor of the Bioroids was strong against kinetics and near-immune to energy. The only vulnerability was to non-directed contact explosions producing concussion effects through the armor matrix. In other words, a HEAT round's plasma jet, or a fragmentation warhead going off with a proximity fuse, would be just as useless as the other weapons, when used on a Bioroid. It had to be a standard, not anti-armor, HE round, and having it go off in contact with the armor, as to send shock waves through multiple areas of the crystalline structure from the large footprint of such a round, disrupting the very structure of the armor. It was a very efficient design for a high-tech mecha, as every high-tech society typically abandons such primitive warheads long before reaching interstellar travel capability. Ironically, it would have been a very different story had the Southern Cross had its originally-intended mecha, instead of going its own way after Edwards stole those mecha to up-arm the REF mission to Tyrol."

. "How does one 'steal' the mecha of a military force?"

"It was the result of a combination of corruption, a poorly worded delegation of authority, and a desire by some of those on the side of the 'victim' to deliberately foment hatred and distrust of the REF.

"The mission consisted of two sections; the first was the REF itself, which was a military transport and defense force, commanded by Rick, with Lisa as the higher rank, but technically subordinate, captain of the SDF-3. The other element was civilian; a council made up of a select group of elected and appointed officials acting as ambassadors in charge of a diplomatic corps, with Emil as the supervisor, given his having the greatest knowledge of the destination based on his study of Zor's computer. He also doubled as the chief engineer for the fold systems, since that was expected to be a position that would only be an issue before and after any diplomatic role.

"Almost half the council were political hacks, who only went on the mission from it offering a more opulent lifestyle than staying at home, and giving a prestige they hoped they could use after coming home as a springboard into the prime minister chair. As such, they also had ties, active or dormant, to those that had backed the Southern Cross' merger into the RDF."

"How did such a small group in the south, become so powerful? We know now that they attacked Khyron's base of operations hours before Khyron showed up here, and were shocked to find out one of the derelicts was flying off, in the distance. Had we given that report more credibility, we might have been prepared."

"Don't be that hard on yourself. Your spies had indicated that Khyron wanted that generator to leave Earth, to return to Masters' space. You even had it rigged to slag itself and send out a hyperspace signal, once the secret package detected whatever ship it was in had defolded successfully. Your analysts - and the Masters, I might add - underestimated the capricious nature of Khyron's mind. It had struck him that you were sitting ducks, and he decided to take a shot at revenge, pardon the pun, before departing - despite orders that he was not to take any action that could accidentally destroy the SDF-1's hidden contents. But, let's get back to the origin of Armies of the Southern Cross.

"The ASC as you know it is a loose association of former UEDC units and local forces that survived Dolza in the Southern Hemisphere. They retain communication and other assets that originally belonged to the UEDC, tied through the Grand Cannon facilities that were under construction in various stages in Africa, Australia and South America. The organization name actually comes from the faction under Colonel Rolf Emerson at the Australian site, but it is the Brazilian faction that will come to dominate, commanded by European Union Brigadier Anatole Leonard, who was the interim commander of the Brazil Cannon site for the construction phase. As such, the facility was about as well defended as Alaska Base was during your debriefing on returning from the misfold.

"The Australian Southern Cross primarily dealt with Indonesian and Indo-Chinese Malcontent threats - frankly, the terrain down under was too hostile even for Zentraedi, and even those that are there, are there by choice, micronized, and loyal to Breetai. The axial shift from Alaska Base's firing will eventually help it return to a climate more like that of the era where the Aboriginals settled it, but that's decades away even with active land reclamation. Emerson is destined to become a close friend of the RDF, and even served as foster parent for Dana, Noel, and Claudia's nephew, Bowie - whose lovely Tiresian wives you have already met.

"Africa's Southern Cross mainly served as a local police force, under a succession of leaders that seemed to change as often as someone could work a transfer to another continent or a commission in the RDF. There were numerous Zentraedi conflicts, but most were at best considered banditry, except for a terrorist nuke used on a meeting of those groups that were assimilating into Terran culture - and even that was done on the orders of a South American Malcontent leader. Eventually, the Neo-Soviets tried to move in and annex the greening Sahara regions that were potentially more fertile than the areas that they were rehabilitating at home, and that led to a massive land war between locals and the Soviets, during which the African ASC stayed as a neutral humanitarian force caught in the middle, for the duration. The Soviets' actions actually managed to do something a half-century of foreign aid, AIDS and the starvation after Dolza's attack had failed to do - unify sub-Saharan Africa beyond the old tribal conflicts.

"But, the Western Hemisphere Southern Cross, if you don't intervene, will quickly devolve into a clusterfuck. A xenophobic religious movement called 'The Chosen' will arise in the next year; hopefully, not to anywhere to the same extent as on my world, because the destruction of New Macross City was seen by The Chosen as a divine act, for its folly of associating itself with Zentraedi. Elements of the movement will start moving into politics north of Patagonia, and into the leadership of the Southern Cross. Eventually, those they couldn't convert, they would get their hooks into other ways, such as blackmail.

"They would also gain allies from some of the less ethical members of Lang's own research unit - specifically, one Lazlo Zand, and his cabal of Protoculture mystics in Monument. That sick bastard needs to be cashiered immediately; and, though I know you all won't do it, I'd recommend executing him as soon as possible. By this time, he's already started with human experiments with Protoculture, including trying to duplicate deliberately the alterations that Zor's 'Eve' AI hit Lang with, back in the 1999 initial penetration. That 'mind boost' is why Lang went from being just one of the greatest minds on Earth, to being a 21st century high-tech da Vinci, as he had the equivalent of a century's scientific and technological advancement downloaded into his mind.

"Zand's attempts will lead to a much darker alteration, as it will tap into the dark machinations if the semi-sentience engineered into the Invid Flower of Life, to drive those consuming it as food or a drug to act in a manner that would further Haydon's plans for godhood. He even knows about little Dana's potential for power, and thinks there's some way to take those latent abilities for himself - he will spend much of the next 4 years trying to get access to her for those mad experiments, In our world, they only stopped by the intervention of Rolf Emerson, whom had become a good friend of the Grants and Sterlings after moving to Monument to be the military liaison between the RDF and the Australasian Sector. He ended up being at the right place at the right time when all of us in Dana's family were occupied by other matters. Noel, which you'd think would be the bigger target, had already scared him off in an earlier encounter - or more accurately, Karen did, before the event that rapid-matured her; and whatever dark voices talked to him, told him that Karen Noel was inconsequential to the grand goal. But, the subject we were discussing was the Southern Cross; let's get back to that.

"The Chosen were, in reality, being manipulated by Zand's cabal, to foment the strife and hatred Zand believed to be necessary to bring out the power he'd been promised by that otherworldly sentience. Unfortunately, they were such tools, that others thought they could be manipulated as well, only to find themselves ensnared in a web of blackmail as the tables were turned on them. Anatole Leonard was one of those. He found himself at a crossroads - his force was becoming more and more xenophobic, yet he was secretly having an affair with a Zentraedi woman. Exedore might be aware of her; Seloy Deparra.

"Seloy was commander of Azonia's second Quadrono squadron, therefore putting her junior only to Miriya; in fact, some say she was the pilot for the insertion of Miriya into the SDF-1. Unlike Miriya and Azonia, after Dolza she jumped at the chance to leave the military chain of command, and attempt to become a civilian. In fact, up to the point of that relationship with Leonard, she'd succeeded even better than Miriya. But, as the ASC became the military government of Brasilia, in the wake of several infrastructure crises, it also became more and more anti-Zentraedi, and it took its toll on their relationship.

"Then, one day, Seloy disappeared. When she reappeared, she had a son, and claimed to Miriya that military goons had kidnapped her, with the intent of killing her once she had the baby, and that she'd escaped. She became one of the leaders of the Zentraedi resistance, of one of the factions that advocated bringing in the RDF to displace the ever-more-corrupt local forces. In fact, she'd called Miriya in to plead her case once more, to show the mistreatment of the Zentraedi at what was supposed to be a food ration distribution point, when things went even more wrong than anyone could possibly imagine."

"A riot?" Lisa asked.

"If only... I wasn't on Earth at the time. It occurred while I was stationed in space, my squadron being considered a bit of a risk from having a Zentraedi pilot - Karen & Noel's mother. Before we had the chance to come back to Earth, we were given the mission that led to the cross-dimensional fold accident on this very scout ship, at the time a derelict that we'd intended to salvage and scrap for the SDF-3 project. By the time we were back on Earth, the events had been past almost eighteen months, and many more atrocities made it something so far gone, as to not want to even discuss it. Miriya only talked about it when she was in a really foul mood, and under the influence of something; I heard it only because she was reliving it as a nightmare, after being exposed to the atmosphere of Garuda, and Marie and I were at her side.

"The protest started, and mecha were brought in for crowd control, loaded with a mix of riot control weaponry, as well as some heavy weaponry in case some idiot decided to bring a Regult. Then, the food trucks arrived, but turned out to be empty of food. The Micronized Zentraedi began rioting, and then... then... someone ordered the Destroids to fire on the crowd - and they did so with their anti-mecha weapons, not their crowd control ones."

"My God..."

"Yeah; the incident caused the general unrest in the Western Hemisphere to explode into full-scale insurrection. It took the better part of three years to quiet it, by which time the worst part of Soviet African War hit. Between the two wars, nearly every known child on Earth with Zentraedi blood was killed, directly or indirectly, which was part of Zand's grand plan. Only Dana, Noel, and a few we secreted away elsewhere, survived on Earth - though we'd sent tens of thousands of assimilated Zentraedi to the colony worlds that you'd designated, Admiral. In fact, less than one in ten thousand of the Zentraedi currently on Earth were still here in 2020. Nearly all of the ones left in the solar system were those that had remained as crew of the Factory Satellite and a few minor vessels such as this one, after Breetai's ship was dismantled to build the SDF-3. Officially, Seloy died in that incident. In fact, she was still alive on our world in 2018, leading the most technologically advanced malcontent band, one that was providing weaponry to other groups, before disappearing.

"She quite probably was one of those that disappeared into our designated sanctuary beyond Zand's vision, but everyone who went in got a new identity, that we treat as sacrosanct, in order to put the horrors of that conflict permanently in the past. It would serve no purpose to bring out the war crimes of the past, when the whole matter of what triggered them on both sides was a bit of a 'chicken or egg' debate, and most of the witnesses are dead."

The door buzzer sounded, interrupting the conversation.

"Who is there?" Scott asked.

"Lieutenant Ron Lewis, sir. I was contacted by Noel Tyler, and told to bring Dana here."

Scott suspected something was off; Noel probably would have told Dana to bring Lewis here, had it been something she'd done. He keyed the number for Medical, where Noel was helping her husband with a bunch of amputee and congenital defect correction cases for the ship's chamber-based regeneration technology.

"Noel, have you sent anyone up here to the conference room?"

"No... let me guess - my sister is up to her tricks again."

"That's how I read it, too; I'll tell you later what comes of it." Scott broke the link, and hit the button to remotely operate the door. "Come on in, you two. By the way, that wasn't Noel, but Karen, that had you come here - either of you know why?"

"She said that events were being discussed up here that Dana and I had unique vantage points for."

"Well, somehow, I don't think she brought Dana up here to discuss a particular mad scientist, as mentioning his name often results in unpleasant actions from her-"

"-Damn straight!"

"... So, I would figure it would have something to do with the Malcontent Uprisings, Project Siegfried, or the Southern Cross. Lewis, you grew up in the Siegfried facilities, if I remember correctly. I would guess that is why you're here."

"Project Siegfried?" Gloval asked.

"I mentioned it in passing, earlier. It was actually known by at least a half-dozen names, including 'Hydra', 'Fury', 'Safehouse' and 'Firewall'. It was quite literally an internal conspiracy, including myself, the Hunters, the Sterlings, the Grants, and Emil Lang; also a very few select Zentraedi that were beyond reproach, such as Exedore, Breetai, and the then-captain of this scout ship. We set up dozens of major and minor front operations, meant to divert materials to the construction of a hidden redoubt in the UEG protectorate of Arabia. While there were hundreds of people who knew that the redoubt was being built, but only a couple dozen knew that it was an even further masquerade to conceal that there was an even more secret facility in South America.

"Both facilities were meant to be autonomous from UEG, RDF and ASC control - in fact, the South American facility was unknown to all those in the Arabian base, save its commanders, and everyone else in the know about it was in space or on the SDF-3. Once sealed, they would be self-sufficient, and only the less-secret one would have any outside contact. Personnel would be limited to those with no outside family, but included both singles and entire families. The Arabian facility, Fortress Gloval, would seal its doors a year after the SDF-3 left. The other, Tisiphone, stopped receiving supplies just prior to the launch, as no one would remain on Earth, other than the commanders of Gloval, that even knew it existed. There was one major difference, besides the secrecy, though.

"Fortress Gloval was constructed from scratch, utilizing areas underground that were tapped out oil fields. The Soviets, among others, knew that it was there, but not its exact location. But, Tisiphone was already there in South America, only needing new life support facilities and long overdue maintenance, after being abandoned for twelve thousand years."

"Did you just say, twelve _thousand_ years?"

"Yes, I did. It was an ancient space tracking facility, equivalent to NORAD's Cheyenne Mountain facility, combined with secret research labs for the pursuit of faster-than-light travel and communications. It was, as near as we can tell, the only part left from two ancient societies that destroyed each other in a war that precipitated the end of the last ice age, and nearly all traces that survived the war were lost in the flooding that followed the war. It lay hidden in the Andean foothills until Karen, Marie and I stumbled on it after being shot down by a Zentraedi derelict. And, if you're wondering, most of the people who evacuated the facility after the carnage started settling down, boarded their prototype ship in orbit, and flew off for what they thought was another starfaring civilization. What they found was an empty, though habitable, moon orbiting a gas giant in a far-away constellation. What their space probe had seen, was their own descendants - the Robotech Masters.

"The actual science makes my head hurt even thinking about it, but their propulsion system was based on tachyon-based science, that they understood even less than we did in 2040, even with the best minds on Haydon helping. They didn't realize that their hyperspace drive, using a tachyon basis, was dependent on its mass-to-thrust ratio - they erred thinking the number was a constant, not a variable. Balanced correctly, it would allow near-instantaneous travel. In fact, their in-system test bed, by a fluke, was so balanced. Unbalanced, it could send something forward or backward in time, even communications, something not readily apparent, when you can't test both ends at the same time. However, near as we can tell, it can't actually be used to deliberately alter the past.

"Their interstellar probe went forward in time, then modulated its broadcast signal until it managed to blunder into roughly the reverse time shift to its forward travel, and give the system on this end the inverse with which to establish two-way communications. Of course, before more than a few images were sent back, the Masters detected it and destroyed it, feeling that there were no unknown forces that could be sending innocent probes. And, one of its failed earlier attempts to calibrate arrived years earlier when there were no receivers, only a few scientific instruments that indicated that they received an intelligently-designed signal from that direction, leading them to explore that vector in space. In the end, their decision to go to that star system was the result of one hell of a time paradox that they created themselves."

"So, what kind of condition was the facility in, after all those years?"

"When we found it, it was mostly intact and reasonably functional. Most of the consumables were taken when the occupants left, but they left things ranging from spare clothing to the control hardware for the base systems. The original reactor was actually still barely operable, having been reduced to minimal power, and a lot of the doors, plumbing and lights still worked. However, there was a coolant leak, years after we resettled the Tisiphone force there, that got out of control. And, because we didn't fully understand the emergency shutdown procedures, that resulted in the base having to be abandoned shortly before the Invid arrival, until a couple years ago, when we had the resources to go back in and start decontamination. We're still cleaning the mess up, but at least there's a new reactor installed now, and automated decon robots cleaning the place room by room.

"The creators of the facility were an interesting bunch. Their society had traditionally, deliberately, limited themselves to islands and isolated coastal valleys, where the stone-age cultures of the mainland would have nearly no contact with them from which to be contaminated. Their rival civilization had been coastal as well, and were the basis of most Hindu myth - and no small part of Zoroastrian myth as well. Both had strong cultural aversions to permanent continental settlements more than a couple hundred meters above their sea level. Everything they made was designed to be long-lived in terms of operation, while also being easily recyclable or biodegradable.

"The facility was an anomaly to that pattern, being located in central South America, apparently as a safety and security precaution for its research. As any anthropologist can tell you, pre-Zentraedi evidence indicated that the early migrants to the Americas had never successfully colonized south of Panama during that time, though evidence existed, highly controversial, of attempts made as early as fifty thousand years ago - possibly from the ancestors of the same culture that eventually built the facility.

"The facility computer was in relatively rough shape, from memory drop-outs, but the hardware itself was still barely functional from having limited robotic self-repair and a 3C system to recycle and construct parts. However, given that the society's language involved apparently collapsed back to stone-age level once it got to Tyrol, then re-evolved, the only one that ever understood the language in the data files even partially was Karen, and that was pretty much through something akin to divine intervention from the person who manipulated her creation.

"It wasn't until 2030, after we returned from Tyrol, that they were able to fully create an emulation interface with it. Interestingly, we found out on reaching Tyrol, that much of Tyrolean tech was based on computer technology that they found in primitive archeological sites that had been turned into jewelry by the primitives, that they then reverse engineered. Between the research we brought back and what the ASC had captured from the Masters, we were able to finally back up the existing data files, and when there was a radiation leak later that year, they moved the files to Gloval. When we left, the files were STILL estimated to be about five years from being fully deciphered, because of language issues. After all - how would an alien know what we meant by the words 'watt', 'hertz' or newton', without context? Or how does one determine the length of any other unit measuring a rate over time, without precise knowledge of their time units? Those were eventually figured out, much like how the science fiction writer James P. Hogan did it for a fictional lost human society, but it was nowhere as easy for our people as it was for his characters.

"Now that I've explained WHAT it was, the lieutenant can start telling you what it was like living there. Sit down, you two - we're not exactly being formal here; hell, we're not even technically on duty for this."

"Well... That's going to be complicated." The tall, reddish-brown-haired security officer said, pulling up a chair. "I've been living under an assumed name since before I moved to Tisiphone. In fact, it wasn't until that I got there, that I was among other children for the first time in three years. They were the first kids I'd seen since, well..."

"Well, what?" Dana asked, then got a bit uncomfortable, as her subordinate looked at her.

"I've been keeping something from you, Dana. After all, it's part of the security protocols for those from the Project."

"What's that?"

"Well, the last kid I saw before my mother dragged me into the deep Amazon, was you, Dana, when my mother tried to talk your mother into taking a more active role campaigning against my father. Miriya left you with the sitter, and Mother took me and your mother to that rally at the food distribution. You know how badly that turned out."

"Hirano?"

"Yeah... Guilty as charged. I'm the one that caused Anatole Leonard to go rampaging across the Southlands for three years, trying to find me. Mother never forgave him, for what he supposedly did to her while she was pregnant - but I found out things back while you were fighting the Masters, through those back doors into the Southern Cross computer systems. I thought about telling you back at Brasilia, where we were being retrained for the Invid invasion, but I wasn't sure how you or your old squadmates would handle who either of my parents were.

"Father wasn't the one who had Mother kidnapped - it was the SPOOK cabal, who wanted to kill Mother after I was born, then use me as a hostage, to control Father. My disappearance, and presumed death, made it to where they could only attempt to manipulate him, and when you brought down Petrey's Alpha sabotage scheme as a teenager, it meant that the Southern Cross was relatively free of his influence - though that was little help, given that the UEG was the one really calling the shots during the war, and they were completely in the tank for 'he-who-must-not-be-named-around-Dana'. Had the Edwards clone not misappropriated all of the Southern Cross and Fortress Gloval's Alphas before delivery, Father's frontal attack strategies probably would have worked against the Masters, from the Bioroids' vulnerability to missiles - and that would have been before the Masters resorted to sticking Zor in a cockpit, or got close enough to Earth to start kidnapping civilians for replacement pilots."

"So, after the Massacre, you ended up living in the jungle?"

"I wouldn't quite call it the 'jungle'; at least not until much later. Mother fell in quickly with a group of Zentraedi that had received various levels of technological training, some of it illegal. Part of the initial slowness of our departure, was that one of her closest friends had taken a fifty cal round through the abdomen, and by some miracle it didn't kill her. It did, however, mean that it was weeks before we could move her from the illegal clinic we took her to, and that actually was to our benefit, as by that time, the locals were more concerned with terrorist attacks than trying to locate us. I grew up relatively innocent, as best a child can among a society who had no concept of childhood. Most of the ugly truth was above my ability to comprehend, but when one is living in an underground city with little else to do for a decade, I eventually found myself talking with the others, about the crazy events of the years outside.

"We went from the clinic, to the makeshift factory that the gearheads were using to try to repair and rebuild mecha. Mother gave them much better direction, convincing them to put more standardized elements in their work, instead of everything being custom-built. Eventually, we were contacted by that one rogue RDF Zentraedi that terrorized Indochina and South America for much of 2016 and 2017, but only Mother recognized that poor woman's condition for what it was - insanity resulting from a near-toxic exposure to raw Protoculture. Way too much like Khyron, and Khyron's insanity was one of the reasons she told Azonia 'no', when they tried to recruit her. Still, she was useful, and the temporary alliance got the Scavengers a new factory, and she let the old one get 'discovered' and destroyed, to try to make the military think they'd destroyed us.

"Then, one of the teams buying salvage from the African conflict reported back that the locals had found something they didn't quite understand, and were looking to sell. It was a chemical weapon; a biotoxin that was being experimented with by the Neasians in the 90s war, using unsuspecting allies in the despotic African regimes to cover their trail and provide test subjects- complete with the equipment to grow the medium that produced it, and the refining equipment. One of the other teams had been experimenting with the new equipment to make insect-sized robots, originally for spying or possibly carrying tiny explosive charges for sabotage. These two items seemed to be meant for each other, and the bots were modified to have syringes to deliver the toxin, and sensors to detect Protoculture traces in the sweat of targets - only those without the traces would be 'bitten'."

"What did the toxin do?" Lisa asked.

"Initially, a fever, but as it was metabolized, the by-products caused extreme paranoia and hallucinations, as well as heightened aggression, as it throws everything out of balance. As you can figure out, the combination of these effects would result in a group of victims trying to kill each other, and anyone around them. If someone managed to survive that stage, they'd still have to deal with 'coming down' from the hormonal effects, which were as stressful as detox for a hard-core drug addict. It was a really nasty thing, and some commented long after the fact that any race disturbed enough to develop such a thing deserved having it used on them. Cooler heads pointed out that the existence of Tisiphone proved that we were the same race, and that neither branch of humanity had gotten any wiser in thirteen thousand years. But, before it could be used on more than a few human and Zentraedi test subjects, Karen Freeman intervened."

"How was that?"

"Karen had been tracing the events of 2016, where her mother supposedly did something on Earth, when in fact, Kayra had been in an alternate universe for six months, coming back pregnant with Karen in late December. This led to finding out about her mother's clone-sister, who was the person I mentioned earlier, that survived that horrible wound. On doing her own freelance intelligence work, with her psychic powers, she pretty much was able to do in two weeks, what the RDF & ASC intel hacks hadn't managed to do in 2 years - find the Scavenger base. She brought Miriya in to confront my mother, but not before using her powers to infiltrate several installations and plant explosives that she detonated during the confrontation. She also pointed out something that was very important for me - that Dana and I, as well as Karen herself, would be read as human, and subject to attack by the robotic bugs, as the placental barrier kept half-Zentraedi and naturally born ones from having the Protoculture traces of their parent. After telling Mother that implementing the plan would not be tolerated, she gave us an out - instructions on how to get to Tisiphone, when things turned bad. Karen then left with Miriya, and destroyed the bio-weapon facility minutes later, in a rather flamboyant display of her powers for the time.

"The Scavengers stayed long enough to shift the balance of power in Africa in favor of the alliance of Zentraedi and micronians fighting the Soviets, then over half of us made the trip to the Peruvian Andes. Karen's aunt remained behind, resulting in the events that became immortalized in song - at least when Father wasn't trying to get the song banned."

"A song?"

"A song against inter-racial violence, and the futility of conflict between human and Zentraedi. Karen's aunt was, prior to her injuries at the Massacre, romantically involved with a young human man that had managed to infiltrate the Zentraedi resistance. That man was the godson of Anatole Leonard, and was there only with one goal - to find me. Ironically, he found love, instead. On the day of the Massacre, he was going to confront my father, and tell him that he was going to marry Tinya, even if it meant being disowned. But, fate intervened, and he believed her killed in the attack. In the end, he changed from Intel to ground forces, to distance himself from what happened, and on the fateful day of the Scavengers' last stand, he faced off with the Scavenger leader, in a no-holds-barred battle between a Glaug-based custom mecha and his Spartacus Hovertank. Only at the end of the fight, did the two former lovers realize who they were fighting, and by that time, she was mortally wounded. He held her as she died, and died himself from his wounds on the battlefield, refusing to seek help as he sat there, on the field."

"That's incredibly sad... did it really happen that way?"

"Amazingly, yes," Scott answered. "The onboard recorders on the hovertank caught it all. I got to see the raw footage, because of what happened later. Ron, if you want to continue?"

"Father tried his best to suppress the footage, but it was leaked out, and there was a massive legal battle over the remains of the two. After the SDF-3 left, he tried to have the song banned, but it was still performed in spite of such bans - most notably by Noel Freeman and Bowie Grant, who were immune to that sort of prosecution before their enrollment in the Robotech Academy, though getting caught later got them busted to the point that they left the Academy as privates in Dana's hovertank unit, instead of technical NCOs away from combat."

"So, what happened from there?"

"Fortress Gloval, the less-secret of the two facilities, was about 90% human, 10% Zentraedi," Scott said, taking back over the 'history' lesson. "The ratio was about 50/50 in Tisiphone. Only about one in ten thousand of the Zentraedi forces of the Soviets remained. Most died, but about twenty percent either defected or were captured, and those were forwarded onto one of the colony ships converted from Zentraedi fleet ships and launched that first decade, to settle habitable worlds along the planned SDF-3 course. The Russians, once their Zentraedi population was reduced to a level that their agriculture and failing food processors could sustain, pulled back to eastern Europe and parts of Siberia, and this made the Scandinavian sector feel a bit more secure, since most of the pressure that caused Soviet saber-rattling was gone. The REF made a big push to recruit most remaining Zentraedi in the Americas for colony or fleet positions, as the Southern Cross became the heir-apparent to the RDF on Earth. The Sterlings didn't trust Leonard, and, frankly, he hated them, as their child survived, when he lost his. But, it was Leonard that the UEG wanted to be in charge, simply because they loathed Rolf Emerson for being incorruptible. Technically, the ASC would be subsumed into the RDF, and the command structure merged, but the events surrounding the SDF-3 launch threw a wrench into things."

"Edwards, I believe you said." Lisa said.

"Yes. Well, in our case, he had taken a more belligerent role, due to some of Haydon's manipulations of Zand. When we showed back up in December 2016, unexpectedly, in our original home universe, with this Zentraedi scout loaded with technology ten years in advance of what the RDF currently had, Zand panicked. He realized that we had knowledge of the events to come, and that his contingency plans I had accidentally overheard before I left, had to be put in motion. Edwards took some of his loyal goons, and set off to eliminate Emerson.

"Zand had already been thwarted by Rolf once, trying to get access to Dana, and the top secret preliminary data transmission we made to Lang about where we had been intercepted by Zand. When he saw that his test subject was going to be put over into Emerson's care when the SDF-3 launched, and that Edwards' loyalty was going to be called into question, he ordered Edwards to take Emerson out, in transit between Earth and the Lunar shipyards. Emerson was already being looked at to assume command of Earth's defensive space forces after the SDF-3 departure, since his Southern Cross branch was most closely allied with the RDF; and as such, he was involved in the development of the Tristar class system defense frigate. There would be a tight window where he could eliminate Emerson's transport before we could get back to Earth, and maybe even do something to stop us - it wasn't quite apparent that we were coming back with more than a repaired ship. When we realized what was going on, we launched our Horizon transport we brought back, which had its standard Alpha and Beta pair attached to the underside, and closed that window. We weren't about to use the fold engines - after all, the fold back had been just as unplanned as to the fold to that other dimension. We defeated Edwards, but we had to kill him and his men to do so. Too bad he didn't stay dead."

"Excuse me?"

"Zand had already taken cell samples and a brain scan of him. This allowed him to use an unmodified cloning chamber to bring back Edwards - more than once, in fact. He made one to act as a hidden agent, that we eventually discovered and rooted out a year before the SDF-3 launch. Another one, made to appear much younger than either the original or the other clone, was infiltrated into the SDF-3 complement, into his old squadron. The clone ended up doing many of the same things the original did in the universe we visited. Damn Haydon and his interference."

"What was it that he did, initially, to the SDF-3 mission? You've already explained how he subverted the REF, and attempted to set himself up as the conquering hero."

"He asked Emil if he could draw additional mecha to be placed onboard the SDF-3, a couple days before launch. One of the concerns about the mission was that we might be under-armed, should the Masters call our bluff, and Edwards played on it. As Edwards, then known by the alias of Riley, was technically a subordinate and proxy for Leonard, he could make the request without drawing immediate attention from the Earth centrists, when all hell would have broken loose had Max, Rick or Lisa made a request for more weapons. However, on Zand's recommendation, Edwards took EVERY Alpha and Destroid that had already been produced for, but not delivered to, Fortress Gloval and the former Southern Cross units. Leonard didn't find out until the fold countdown was too far along to abort, and by that time, we had the distraction of Janice and Minmei flying into the fold bubble. The REF didn't even realize the extent of the thefts until they were looking to arm the former subjects of the Masters against the Invid.

"As a result, Leonard demonized the RDF, not realizing it had been done on Edwards' orders, and reverted all the ASC back to that force's original names and order of battle. The RDF was given to Emerson, and turned into an underfunded reserve force, while additional ASC branches and units were mustered for the Northern Hemisphere. Zand's flunkie Petrie, now on the outs with his former boss Leonard, further undermined the Southern Cross by using backdoors in the operating software of the Southern Cross version of the Alpha, and literally flying the project into the ground via virtual reality links. They actually had a school set up for student prodigies, who were using the VR equipment to make the Alpha pilots seem to go rogue, or crash, almost always fatally for the pilot. Dana, and the fiancé of one of the dead test pilots, managed to bring down that conspiracy, though I don't think Dana or the school were all too willing of the matchup."

"Damn straight I wasn't! I also wanted to strangle the bastards that tried to insinuate that Terry and I had a sexual relationship. I had a crush on him, yes, but he was over twice my age, and was mourning his dead girlfriend, even after Petrie was taken down. It was more of a big brother/little sister type of friendship. He finally got sick of all the scandal-mongers, and ended up in Tokyo, joining a top secret mecha development program. I lost touch with him, not long afterward. I later found out he was one of those killed in the Andrews Incident in 2027, having been on the transport that an advance force of the Masters captured, coming back from Mars."

"That would probably be the next major event in the history of the Southern Cross," Scott continued. "The Masters' agents killed the passengers and crew, and replaced them with clones with their original memories, but programmed to disrupt the defense of Earth. Only one person escaped prior to execution, managing to stow away after he was cloned, and tried, unsuccessfully, to get the word out to the ASC. He eventually was killed, but not before he got one of the unit's prototype mecha out into the open, hoping that the compromised secrecy would alert the command in Monument that something was seriously wrong in New Tokyo.

"The civilian that ended up getting his hands on the prototype managed to disrupt the clones' plans to start a war between the Soviets and the Southern Cross, but only barely, and a decade of detente went up in flames, so that the Soviets sat out of the defense of Earth from the Masters. It also tipped off the Southern Cross command that something was seriously wrong with the communications that were supposedly coming from the REF, and that war was imminent."

"As much as Uncle Rolf and Leonard fought over how to fight the war, it was only their working together furiously in the eighteen months between that incident and the actual Masters fleet's arrival, that actually got the Southern Cross as prepared as we were," Dana noted. "What eventually caused their rift during the war, was that each thought the other's strategy squandered the resources they'd fought so hard together to scrape together in the year before the war." Dana started getting one of her melancholy looks, as she finished up, so Scott jumped back in to continue.

"We've already gone over the war with the Masters a half-dozen times over the last month, so we'll skip over it. I arrived back to Earth on this scout, as its emergency fold to escape the Masters ended up arriving right where we could use it in the civil war against Edwards - ONE YEAR BEFORE it left Earth. Yeah, it's major headache time, though we didn't realize it at the time. As it was, a fold miscalculation had made us lose a few years in transit with the SDF-3, and we didn't realize the full oddity of our time situation until months later. When left for Earth, the trip's time vector was a bit off again, putting us there right after the Masters and Southern Cross fell. We began trying to unify the factions remaining, but failed. We started training all that would agree to put Earth before their national interests, but we didn't have enough time to train more than a couple thousand, that we'd trained to be the nucleus of an anti-Invid resistance force, going out in twos and threes to recruit others to be underground forces waiting for the REF.

"The Invid came, destroyed all those that stood against them, then went into occupation mode, going back to the drive that Haydon placed in them, to try to evolve past humanity. But, actually evolving BACK to their own lost humanity was not part of his plan, but it still managed to almost work out for him- and it did work, in his original universe."

"And the secret bases?" Exedore asked.

"Fortress Gloval served its purpose well, liberating the Eastern Hemisphere in combination with my forces and the sea navy forces that the Invid missed. Tisiphone, though, had to be evacuated from that reactor accident, shortly before the Invid arrived, but while they'd been sitting there for over a decade, they actually rebuilt the wrecked ship that shot me down in 2017, and led to the discovery of the ancient facility. That gave us another ship in-system with which to defend the Earth. It was used to effect to save the third wave of the early liberation forces by aborting its approach to Africa, though most of rest of the force ended up being destroyed on approach or on the ground, over the Pacific or in the Americas."

"So, all of this can be prevented?"

"One would hope so - Edwards' court martial and execution was a good start, but we've still got to track down Zand, wherever he's gone underground to. I don't think he'll live to see trial, though - too many people in my crew have reasons to see him dead, and I'm certain that whoever does find him will let us know by an anonymous depositing of his corpse. As much as I hate that kind of lack of due process, and insubordination, I also understand that he's too dangerous to let live, even if to see trial. Some people are just not redeemable. But, then, that leads us to the next question - what do we do with the Masters, when we get our hands on them?"

As Scott predicted, the Zand issue resolved itself with the death of Zand at the hands of an anonymous vigilante - though Scott was certain it was one of the former members of the 15th ATAC in his crew. Dana and Noel were the obvious suspects, but he was reasonably certain he could account for their location at the estimated time of death. On the other hand, with their ability to teleport, it could have been done in a matter of a couple minutes. Bowie wasn't a suspect, but both the ship's doctor and chief engineer had been off-ship for most of the day that the event occurred, helping out Dr. Lang in reactivating this world's Janice. Both were "off the grid" for hours, and Louie had Janice out for a "test drive" for at least an hour, even when Alex could be placed as being with Lang. Of course, he wouldn't put it past Lang to have been complicit with such action, anyway.

As for the Masters, the decision was made to wash their hands of them. The Invid were still united in this time period, and were still on Optera for the most part; it would be left up to the Invid to decide their fate. The Masters would be delivered to them with the protoculture storage matrix from the SDF-1, which Bowie's wives managed to coax from its hiding place.

For once, everything went as planned. The takedown of the Masters was entirely bloodless, including those shriveled walking corpses that called themselves the Elders. The Elders had been the political patrons of the Masters. They had been the figureheads for the Masters' empire, though rarely they interfered with the decisions of Dag, Bowkaz and Shaizan, even less so since the refined form of Protoculture used to make the custom bodies they and the Masters had transferred their minds into were no longer available, with the remaining stocks only good for conventional cloning. Once they reached a level of degradation that made them too conscious of their potential regained mortality, they chose to isolate themselves in a temporal pocket, trying to buy time for their bodies, an older model than the Masters', to last long enough for the Masters to recover the matrix.

After the captures, they made quick superluminal trips around to the rest of the Local Worlds, to acquire others to help entreat the Invid to accept peace. The trip was also used to go into Haydon IV, and terminate the Haydon machine sentience in the planet. The latter was done without the permission of the Haydonites, who were very upset, at least until they found out their free will had only been on the whim of that sleeping entity, and that they'd been expected to sacrifice themselves on its awakening.

Approaching Optera was dangerous enough, as there wasn't any real data on what the world was like between Zor's death and Edwards' takeover of that world, where he radically altered the Royal Hive to fit his needs. It was finally decided just to send the Bernards in using one of their two-seat Shadow Alphas, with a disposable fold booster. Once they made contact, they could call in the rest of the delegation, to deliver the Masters and Elders.

Amazingly, the Bernards reported in within an hour of landing. Marlene/Ariel, despite being converted to full human by Karen, retained the ability to communicate telepathically with the Invid, and was actually able to contact the Regis directly. This led to their being taken into the hive, though the Regent was none too thrilled with it. It took calling in Noel, transporting the prisoners, to convince him of the sincerity of the petition, and to allow the SDF-1 to deliver the Matrix back to Optera. Some of the stores of the Dreamweaver had been the mutant fruits of the flower from the cured Peryton, and those were given to the Regis to feed her husband, to help cure his insanity brought on by the cursed version. Perhaps, once he was cured, he would see the wisdom in pursuing evolution.

With the galaxy at peace, the Dreamweaver and the two SDFs returned to in orbit over Tyrol, helping with the resettlement of the fleet clones to the planet. Preparations started for the next dimensional jump, since the SDFs seemed to have everything in hand...

But, then things got weird, again...

"General Freeman, we would like to go with you to your next destination."

This was the last thing that Scott expected, when Admiral Gloval contacted him. What he thought it might be was a request for him to stay longer, as Cabell was still trying to stabilize things on Tyrol, as the deprogramming to allow the fleet clones to start truly acting on their own wasn't progressing as quickly as they'd hoped.

"May I ask why?"

"We had a dream, that your mission would be better off with us along."

"We?"

"Myself, and nearly all of the command and bridge crews of both ships. For the most part, the visions were identical."

"Hmm... this sounds like someone's trying to manipulate things further. I'll have to get back to you on this, before I can make a decision. Besides, we won't be going for a couple weeks; there's no way we'll depart before the weddings."

"I was hoping you'd say that. Every one of the brides want me to walk them down the aisle, not perform the ceremony, so I have the choice of either finding a suitable chaplain, or ask you to perform the ceremonies."

"I'd rather watch them, not perform them. But, I should be able to help with finding someone suitable for the ceremony."

"Who do you have in mind?"

"If we have the ceremonies out here, Cabell would be a good choice. If we go back to Earth, Breetai would be good as well, as he actually gave Lisa away back in my universe. It would probably help morale here on Tyrol, more."

"I'll bring it up with the others tonight, at dinner. Will you be joining us?"

"Maybe. First, I've got to check on my suspicion about your vision. It's high time I try to get some answers from Karen."

"How do you plan to do that?"

"Through someone she's already used as a mouthpiece on this trip. Karen's a sucker for requests from children."

Minmei let him talk to her youngest daughter later that afternoon, while Kyle had the other two girls at one of the recreational facilities for martial arts lessons. When Karen understood what Scott wanted, she put herself in a trance state, where she was more able to understand his requests. Most of the Seconds had this ability; effectively, it allowed them to function off some of the enhanced mental function their telepathy had absorbed in utero from their mother (and occasionally their father). Karen Freeman was the only one that seemed to have had the ability to keep absorbing such things after birth, from anyone she had contact with - but then, they literally broke the mold after Zor influenced her creation; not even Noel retained it.

"Karen, try to reach out and find the woman who talked to you before," Scott asked, hoping that the request was simple enough for the child to understand.

"I- I can't find her. She not there."

"What do you mean, 'not there'?"

"Nobody home."

"Try again. Maybe they just didn't hear you."

"Okay... somebody there now."

"Is it the one who talked to you before?"

"No, she's diff'rent."

"She?" Scott balked, wondering if he'd accidentally contacted the Regis, or worse.

"I hope you're not disappointed, Uncle," a voice said from behind him.

Scott turned, to find a girl standing there that looked to be, physically, between the age of his daughters and his son. She had emerald hair to her waist, that almost seemed to glow with its own light, and her eyes were like sapphires.

"And who exactly are you, if I didn't already have a good idea."

"My name is Cynthia, and yes, Karen is my mother. You can call me Cindy. My parents are working on something in another dimension, right now, so I was staying with my grandparents, when I heard that someone was trying to contact Mom."

"And, just for confirmation, just who are your father and grandparents? Karen told some of us, but we chose not to print all of that section of her book, due to its potential inflammatory nature."

"Zor is my father. My grandparents are his universe's counterparts of Minmei and Rem. Yes, I know that sounds rather icky, not to mention a bit of a paradox, but substantial parts of Rem's genetics were altered during cloning by Cabell, so that the Masters wouldn't detect him as being a Zor clone. I'm glad that you've kept that part of things under wraps; having it known openly would only make things harder for my two oldest siblings."

"That, it would. Why did your mother pick little Karen here to talk through?"

"Part of it was that Mom considers Minmei to be part of our extended family. Kayla, after all, has half of the genetics of Zor, coming from the same egg that in Father's universe, was fertilized by Rem. Minmei has things that she needs to resolve for herself, and this trip will help do that, as well as help give her counterparts closure. Other members of your crew will have to face personal demons as well; these will require you giving them a bit more latitude in their discretionary powers."

"Does that include why this universes' SDFs want to go with us to the next stop?"

"I would say, 'yes', but I wasn't in the loop on that. As it is, Mom and Dad would probably be mad at me for even talking to you. Don't worry; once you get back home from this extended shake-down cruise, you'll have full control of your vessel's destination, such as that is; you'll still be shooting blind for the most part. There's only one destination that they will want you to go to after that, and that's the world that they are currently shaping into a position to be a first contact situation for you."

"What kind of world would that be?"

"Late 20th century, at least by the time you get invited over. That way, you should be able to help them with some of their planetary issues. And, no, none of the foes you have fought ever existed there."

"That's some comfort."

"Well, I need to go, before my grandparents figure out I'm here. Both my big sister and I have been manipulated to where we've had fully normal human childhoods, but of course you know how that isn't any bearing on my mental development. Would a ten-year-old talk to you like this? Tell my brother and sister to come visit me some time; Musica has the innate power to make the trip, and she should be able to get the destination from linking minds with young Karen, here. Of course, Karen won't remember anything about what happened here today." Cindy bent over, kissed the toddler on the forehead, and the child fell asleep.

"Thanks for answering."

"I did the best I could, under my own limitations. Good-bye, Uncle; hopefully we'll see each other again, on that world Mom & Dad are at right now." She kissed him on the cheek, and faded away.

Scott didn't really get all the information he wanted, but there was one line that was a give-away, that he wasn't sure if Cindy gave deliberately, or accidentally. Specifically, the line about Minmei giving her "counterparts" closure. "Counterparts", being plural, would seem to indicate that there would be at least one more stop in a different alternate history. That would give, at least, an idea of what to prepare the three ships for.

"Did we have to have all the weddings the same week as our departure date?" Scott mused. "Just because OUR Rick & Lisa did, doesn't mean they had to, as well."

"It's one of those things; people want new beginnings. At least they chose not to do them on the day before, and go straight from the honeymoon into the mission." Marie replied, snuggling up to her husband.

"And, what was with that blessing at the end of the ceremony?"

"What? 'May the Principal bless you both'? I think that Cabell meant it as a bit of a jest, having read it in one of those Heinlein books Lang gave him. At least, I hope he did it as a joke."

"I wonder what Gloval thinks about being the only single person left in the original SDF-1 bridge crew?"

"Like a proud substitute father, really. Of course, the only ones still on the ship with him are the Fokkers. Claudia's finally stepped up to Chief of Operations, and Roy's taking over for Maistroff. The rest of the bridge crew are a mix of the old off-shift personnel and some of Breetai's officers. Plus, Musi is going to act as a technical advisor on the SDF-2, and Noel will sit in on the SDF-1, in case we need to use some form of communications other than radio."

"What do you think about our next destination? Cindy's slip, intentional or not, means that where we're heading, there will probably be another Minmei. I'm betting on another fold to Tyrol, but that's just a guess."

"Karen did mention that there's a set of universes similar to ours, but with a completely different history. The fiction writers that spun our story as fiction for their reality, did so by merging three different, unrelated, anime into a new timeline. We even saw parts of two of those universes in Lang's and Tyler's collections. But, no one was really in a position to remember that something that looked like a Spartacus or an Alpha existed in a TV show that 99.9% of the people who ever knew the shows existed died in 2011, and any survivors would have been pushing 60, with the series being forty years prior in their youth, when the similar designs emerged. Even so, the series were sufficiently different to not obviously be related. And, we've not even found anything remotely like our history from 1999 through 2014, in what anime survived Dolza. The closest thing was some Gundam parody called Megaroad, which we only became aware of when the SDF-2 here got named that."

"Where did that name come from, anyway?"

"The grandkid of one of the people working in New Macross City's animation studio. The grandfather actually worked on that old series, but had pretty much forgotten about it, over the years. Only the ship, and the cameo Chinese take-out girl, bear any resemblance to our timeline, and the ship only barely. It launched its incredibly complex transformable fighters from the ship's upper chest, leading to a rather unfortunate name for them."

"Complicated isn't the word I'd use; losing the gun pod made the mecha incapable of landing in fighter mode. Breast fighters, indeed; as flying them would suck hind teat, to use an old expression from my grandfather's time."

."Well, I guess we'll find out the hard way, in a couple days."


	3. Chapter 3

**Second Dreamweaver Defold...**

One of the things Scott had worried about for this part of the mission, is just how different things might be. In the months prior to departure from the universe whose fate he'd just radically altered, he'd searched for his family - only to find out that his parents had never existed on that Earth, let alone he or his siblings. For that matter, neither had anyone in Alex's family. Things were so similar in gross detail as to appear the same, but on closer look, were totally different. This fitted well with the "World as Myth" hypothesis, but being part of the confirming data was a bit unsettling.

They assumed, from the clues given by Cindy and her mother, than the next stop probably would be during the SDF-3 mission - but where and when during those years was another matter completely, in terms of preparation. Would it be pre-launch, at the arrival over Tyrol, or as late as the launch of Saturn Division for Earth in 2035? Would they ride in to save the Farrago over Praxis - or to take part in the liberation of Optera from Edwards? And, it would probably be Edwards they would face, scar and all - after all, if the destination also had no Scott Freeman, then it would be probable that Edwards was never discovered to be the traitorous scum that he was, until it was too late - much as like on the Tyrol that he had found himself on after that original misfold in 2016.

The best he could do is just prepare for the most common contingency, and that was that they'd run into Inorganics at some point in the fight. Lang, Nichols and Tyler had whipped up an solvent that made an excellent anti-Inorganic warhead, as it would expand in a foam matrix on detonation, and dissolve several cubic meters of the structure of those creations within seconds, as if it were acid. Granted, against flesh and blood creatures it would cause first and second degree burns and eat away most clothes, but most equipment in the REF arsenal (or used to build Tiresia) would be unaffected. Given what it would do to an Invid mecha, and its pilot inside (the pilot would FEEL the damage caused to the mecha - let alone the slow painful death once the unit was compromised), use on those was prohibited - after all, deep inside, even an "Eager"/Iiga scout pilot was still a sentient being (if not potentially convertible into a human). If they HAD to be fought, conventional weapons were a lot faster and merciful. The mecha on launch standby, therefore, were armed 60% conventional anti-mecha armaments, 40% solvent, in their missile loads.

When defold came, the expected view of Fantoma filled the main screen - the question then became that of when, and where were they in relation to Tyrol...

"Any idea of the date? And, Where's Tyrol in relation to our position?"

"Working on the date from astrometrics;" Aurora replied. "Tyrol appears to be in opposition to our position. If the REF is present, and we could get line of sight on Tyrol, the SDF-3's chronometer beacon should give us the date it thinks it is."

Given that we really didn't know what the real date was for most of the mission, Scott thought, that would only be of limited help - if this is even the Tyrol of the REF, not earlier.

"Okay, start easing us around. Gloval, Hayes; keep your ships here - we don't want to freak anyone out until we have to. All squadrons report to your fighters and await launch orders. For all we know, there could be anything from the Regent's Invid to the Robotech Masters at full strength ahead. Review your scenarios from your cockpit monitors - you'll have a few minutes lead time before launch in any event to get everyone up to speed on which one applies."

A few minutes later, the limb of Tyrol began peeking over the Fantoman horizon.

"I'm starting to pick up something on the fleet public affairs frequency," Bowie reported. "It seems to be a trial of some sort."

"Trial? Put it on screen." Scott was 99% certain now just WHEN they were, but it never hurt to double-check. Sure enough, it was the mockery that was the attempted show trial of Wolfe and the others, right at the point where Lang turned the tables on Edwards. And, as the chaos erupted during Edwards' escape, he saw no sign of himself (and he'd been part of the trial), so if he had a counterpart here, he'd still be with the Sentinels, like his counterpart in the universe he'd visited had been until the Korra'ti arrived.

"SDF-1, SDF-2; we've got complications. Start heading my way, at half my speed. The circumstances are what I once referred to you as being the REF's darkest hour on Tyrol."

"The Edwards coup?" Gloval asked.

"Correct. We've arrived at a rather precarious point. We can move in and scramble our fighters to fight the Inorganics, but it also means that we'd be flying into a furball of blue-on-blue fighting as well, and with our not exactly being in anyone's IFF database, that will put us squarely in harm's way."

"What's the approximate timeline for the events" Lisa asked.

"Provided we don't do a micro-fold closer, which is NOT a good idea around a ringed gas giant, Edwards' stolen SDF-7 class cruiser will already be powering out of range en route to a safe fold-out position before we get in range to do more than launch fighters to clean up the Inorganics and start rescue operations. The ship was awaiting field trials, but Edwards had already placed a loyal skeleton crew aboard it, in case he had to do a sneak attack on the SDF-3. Most of the crew of the SDF-3 was ready to mutiny, if necessary, try to rescue Wolfe and Lang, and attempt to flee the system at sublight speeds while continuing the fold repairs, to keep it out of the hands of Edwards. Unfortunately, Edwards knew this through his own espionage, and was willing to inflict major damage to the ship to prevent it from fleeing."

"What if we warned the SDF-3?"

"Do you think they'd believe us? After all, we hardly look the part of the Sentinels."

"Who says we have to look the part?" Lisa asked, a determined look on her face. She turned to the right, and spoke to her commo officer. "Sammy, I'll need an audio-only channel, all identifier flags turned off . Cut off the speakers from the other two ships. Helm, move us back into the Dreamweaver's cloak effect radius. Use the audio channel to connect me to the SDF-3 bridge, and I'll need absolute silence on this bridge, once you connect."

"Lisa?" Gloval asked.

"I think I know what she's got in mind. Henry, was Nick Hayes a good poker player?"

"I never could beat him; why?"

"I just hope his daughter is as good at bluffing as he was..."

"SDF-3, this is Admiral Hayes, over," Lisa spoke into her headset.

"Lisa - Admiral, thank God. This is Captain Forsythe. "Where are you?"

"Just barely in audio range, coming around Fantoma. I've got some important intel for you; the Ghost Riders have taken over the new SDF-7, with the intent of using it either to stop you from interfering on the planet, or to make their escape if Lang regains control ground-side. Arrest any suspect personnel on the SDF-3 immediately, and take out the new ship's command tower with your own weapons before they can raise shields. If that's not enough, do what it takes to keep it from leaving."

"Yes, ma'am! Any idea what's going on down-planet? We lost all communications after the trial video cut off."

"Edwards appears to have gained some method of controlling the Invid terror weapons that were shut down several years ago, and retained them for this very night, instead of destroying them as ordered. They're currently ravaging the city. We'll launch the few fighters we brought with us to assist on the ground as soon as we're in range, but once you get the other ship taken care of, you need to interdict any attempts to flee the surface with your fighters; we don't want any other ships hijacked or sabotaged by the traitors. Consider the orbitals closed for outgoing traffic."

"Will do. Admiral, we're scanning for you, but can't pick up your source of transmission."

"We made new friends while away, and they're providing transport on a cloaked vessel. After all, it's not like we'd be safe coming in announced, with Edwards wanting to hang us from the radar mast without a spacesuit. I've gotten some advance scouts on the ground ahead of us, keeping us up to speed on the circumstances in Tiresia, but they aren't set up for combat."

"Good cover, Lisa," Scott said, though only his bridge crew and Gloval's could hear it.

"If you say so - some of the intel weenies are a bit nervous with the circumstances of your transmission, but you check out five-by-five on voice analysis."

"I should hope they're nervous - after all, look what following strange transmissions got me into on Mars back in twenty-ten."

"I seem to recall it got you a husband, eventually."

"I guess it did., though it took long enough to land him."

"Laser cannons are rotated into firing position, and aimed manually. They don't appear to have seen our move, but they do seem to be dropping into a lower orbit."

"Wait till they stabilize that orbit, then fire - the last thing we want to do is hit them while descending, and have the ship crash into the city."

"Rate of descent is now zero - going active targeting, and FIRE!"

Several seconds passed, then the video sensors of the three ships closing on Tyrol picked up the lasers lancing from the SDF-3 and striking the other ship.

"Target is disabled. Engineering aboard the target appears to have stabilized the orbit after the damage, but I doubt they have the crew to actually fly her. Her internal sensors indicated all but five people aboard were on the bridge, and the bridge isn't there anymore."

"Get a boarding crew over there as soon as you can spare them."

"Right away, Admiral."

One hour later:

"Thanks for the loan of these Alphas, General," Rick said, as the three fighter wings left the Dreamweaver's shadow device range, and functioned under their own individual units.

"I wasn't about to let you fly down in your Valks and Lightnings; those things would have given us away. Besides, you'd have had to jettison your payload for reentry, and somehow I don't think you'd have wanted to use those tiny lasers in ground combat, or fly around doing strafing runs. Plus, remember how tough those Bioroids in the simulations were? The Inorganics cut through them like a pinata, when the Invid invaded here - your fighters would be sitting ducks. Remember, only two of the enemy types, other than any Ghosts we might find, have anything resembling ranged weaponry, and those are so weak that it would take lucky shots to more than scratch the armor."

"So, why are you here, and not back in the Captain's chair?"

"I've got important first-hand knowledge of what's going on down here, and know the landmarks. Plus, I've got a couple of specific tasks in mind. The wing from the SDF-1 is to seize REF Base Tyrol, to prevent Edwards from escaping that way. My ship's wing will secure the government center, and push back the Inorganics from it, while attempting to get down to the organic computer Edwards is linked into via his headband interface, to control the Inorganics. Take out Edwards, and the computer returns to default Invid programming, until I can get one of my people to use the band to shut it down; take out the computer, and they shut down without having to kill anyone. I need you and Skull to secure the area around the building I've designated on your onboard map, in case we're early enough to stop him from gaining hostages."

"The incident with Minmei and Kyle, you told us about."

"Yeah, the timeline of that event is all screwy - it was such a mess that we really don't know exactly when it happened. I know that in the world I visited 25 years ago, one of our group managed to cause Edwards to miss a fatal shot, by accidentally stumbling into the act in progress. On my world, my niece got there late, as at the time she had conflicting priorities, and Kyle was already 'mostly dead', and she got my wife to fire up their modified Protoculture Chamber so they could play 'Miracle Max' again. Here, unless we get there in time, Kyle is a dead duck - well, at least until we get him back to the ship, and Minmei would be a hostage."

"So, that's why you taught me how to polarize the helmet, for the building penetration."

"The last thing we need is 'Rick' to intrude in the Lynns' lives, even if you aren't the one they know. Or, for that matter, Edwards seeing you and going after you."

"How come you didn't tell Roy?"

"Well, if Edwards DOES make it over to Base Tyrol and sees him, I figure it would be enough to warp what's left of T.R.'s fragile little mind to have to face Roy again. And, this time I don't think Edwards will come out of it alive; I've got Dana over there as an advisor, in case someone has to do hostage removal as part of the confrontation. Dana can teleport short range with others, but she doesn't like doing it. The question is whether or not she'd intentionally bring whatever arm's holding Minmei with them as she teleported out. That girl can be vicious, sometimes. Don't let her 'sappy romantic when not on duty' side fool you."

Scott, Rick and their four wingmen landed on the outskirts of what had been the headquarters of Edwards' command, what had once been called the 1st TASC Ghost Riders, back on Earth. The buildings were modified survivors of those of pre-Masters Tiresia, and were still tied into the labyrinth of tunnels dating from ancient times. There was no guarantee the tunnels were the same layout here as on Scott's Tyrol, and he never thought to check on the other Tyrol from Rick's universe, but it was worth checking, to bypass as many remaining guards as possible.

"You sure you want me suiting up in this power armor?" Rick asked, trying to figure out the VR-038 controls.

"Well, it will stop most small arms fire, other than the rounds we designed to fight the Inorganics - and Edwards kept those out of production because he didn't want people shooting up his toys. On the other hand, once you get used to it, the exoskeleton makes you able to out-dodge Kyle's special effects from the movie. Besides, it's not like it's weighted down with weapons like the standard models you played with in our simulator."

"And we're going through tunnels? Will we even fit?"

"We should; most of the underground parts of the network were built to be a square cross-section about three meters to a side. Some of them are collapsed, but those are mostly in the sections that were damaged by the Invid four years ago, or by the Masters trying to root out opposition after they took over. This place is built like 20th Century Rome - for several millennia, instead of digging down to ground level, most new construction just buried what was there before, and converted the older buildings into basements and utility space for buildings built on top of them. Some of these tunnels are former street entrances, and a few deep ones are sewers dating from before the first brick was laid in Babylon. No one had a full map of them - the story goes that the Zor and his school buddies from the local equivalent of high school and college spent their youth exploring, and their map still had dozens of tunnels branching off their map that were unexplored when they were too busy as adults for such trivial pursuits."

"Okay, check my suit."

Scott went over, and made sure that all the connections were made properly. Manual union of the Cyclone with the base armor was a bit tricky, since the expert systems in the powered mid-air transformations actually home the moving parts in on their junctions, and even adjust the parts to compensate for different size users. Rick wasn't skilled enough on motorcycles to attempt a transformation on the fly, and Scott had to use the manual adjustment wrenches to get Rick his full range of motion.

"Okay, you're good. Now, let's hope the tunnel under that cover-" Scott motioned to where the other 4 pilots were pulling up the Tyrolean equivalent of a drainage tunnel access plug "-goes where it did back home."

Well, the tunnel ALMOST went to the same location. Here, it appeared that the cell entrance that Scott had used never existed, and that the tunnel exited one building away, through a hidden trapdoor in what was apparently some junior staff officer's office. However, the building was adjoining the target, and it was a simple matter to do a booster-assisted leap up to the neighboring roof, catching the two guys pulling security duty on the roof (and not looking for attacks from below) off guard, and incapacitating them with stunners. From there, it was a matter of stepping through some doors, and into a Tiresian-style transport tube to the basement.

While in the tube, Scott could about hear his own heart pounding in his head. After all, HE had been the one whose errant shot almost did Edwards' work for him. As they stepped out of the tube, he got a radio call from Daniel, who was with Roy at the spaceport, so they held their assault plan up for a few seconds.

"General, the Inorganics just went into recall mode - they're heading back toward the Brain's location at the secondary dust-off, one of Ghost's Horizons. Have you succeeded?"

"Succeeded, hell... We've just got to the detention level. Whatever caused it, wasn't us."

"Be careful, then. We're setting up a mile exclusion zone around the Brain."

"What was that?" Rick asked.

"Status update. Something's different than the other two times I found myself entering this building on this date in history. Be sharp; maybe Kyle succeeded this time, and we don't want to accidentally shoot him, or get our necks snapped by him out of mistaken identity."

"Breaching charges in place, sir," one of the junior pilots reported.

"Okay, blow it!"

"Fire in the Hole!"

Given that they were in full undersuit and Cyclone, they didn't have to worry about shrapnel, backblast, or the noise - or, for that matter, their polarized helmets prevented any momentary blindness from the flash. They rushed the door, to find...

"What the hell?"

In one of the open cells, Minmei sat, sobbing, being held securely in Kyle's arms. Colonel Adams was propped up against the far wall, with half his face blown off. Edwards' body was crumpled on the floor, looking as if he'd been begging for his life, when someone had blown his head completely off; in his hand was a laser derringer that he'd tried unsuccessfully to draw on his attacker. The damage to the two Ghost Riders was horrific, and indicative of a heavy sidearm meant to penetrate body armor that neither man had been wearing. But, who shot them?

"Mommy, can we go home, now?" a small girl's voice said, cutting the silence.

Scott looked through the bars of the other cells, and saw the source.

"Yes, honey, take us home," the other Minmei in the room said, picking up her daughter, and the two faded from sight.


	4. Chapter 4

**Dimension 2, Tyrol  
(date indeterminate)**

The Dreamweaver dropped its cloak when it fired on the Brain, destroying it and most of the remaining Inorganics, and without the brain the remainder collapsed. When it did, all hell broke loose when the REF recognized the two ships flying with it, especially the crews of the SDF-3 and the Valivarre. Things got even more interesting, as Wolfe and his men assaulted the building a few minutes later, unaware of the events in orbit, only to find the threat cooling on the floor, and six men in (to him, prototype) power armor securing the site.

"Don't shoot, Jon, we're friendlies!" Scott called out.

"Did Lang send you?"

"Not exactly. Let's get these two out of here, and we can talk when we get back to Lang and the others."

"That's not good enough an answer."

"Is this good enough for you?" Rick said, putting his back to Kyle and Minmei, and opening his visor so Wolfe could see his face, then closed it back. "We're not from here - and I don't want to bring this up in front of those two, for many of the same reasons that you need to give Minmei some space right now."

"How?"

"I'm a dimensional explorer," Scott said. "In fact, 20 years ago, we served together alongside the Sentinels in my universe. I picked up 'the captain' at my first stop, and after we made sure these events would never occur in their universe, they chose to come with me to help put a stop to them here. We can go into more detail when we're back to a safe location; if it's anything like home, the council survived, and is currently relocating to the SDF-3."

"And, you are?"

"General Scott Freeman; REF retired, now commander of my Earth's Dimensional Exploration Corps. I got into the dimensional business originally, from being in a fold accident in 2016, that dumped me and my salvage team into an alternate universe over Garuda, during the time period that universe's counterparts of you and the Hunters were liberating it from the Regis. After we managed to get back home, shortly after the events corresponding to today, we had some 'issues' that prevented on us capitalizing on more than the most minimal information that we brought back, and experienced the Sentinels campaign first-hand, instead of being barely trusted dimensional anomalies."

The Wolfe Pack members helped the two civilians out of the building, and into one of the transports back to the spaceport. Wolfe, on the other hand, rode back in the same vehicle as Scott, Rick and their men. Others could recover the Alphas later.

"Should I ask what happened to me?' Jon asked, as they traveled.

"Your counterpart died in 2034, fighting the Invid during the occupation of Earth."

"The Invid took Earth?"

"For four years - the REF couldn't make it back in time, because of that asshole cooling in the trunk seizing control of the Regent's half of the Invid, after the Regent died fighting Breetai. Yes, had he gotten out of here, he was heading to Optera, and would have been in prime position to use that same set-up that he used to control the Inorganics to make him the leader of that half the Invid. The Regent tended to recruit the mindlessly obedient half of the race, while the Regis tended to draw the more intelligent and free-thinking to her side.

"As such, the Regis had pretty much told her mate to go fertilize himself, and took her half to look for the world where we came from - one that she got general coordinates for from Rem's mind, since he started recovering Zor's memories that were part of his latent programming Cabell instilled when cloning him as a child to raise. Then, the war between the Southern Cross and the Masters resulted, in effect, to create a big flashing beacon on Earth to draw the Regis in. She invaded less than a year after the Southern Cross and the Masters effectively annihilated each other in a desperate last battle that neither side could afford to let the other win, and managed to both lose as result.

"Your counterpart managed to get there after that battle, but before the Invid, but had to effectively put the unit under military parole with the Regis, to keep the Invid from annihilating them. In the end, he died because Scott Bernard; yes, the boy that attempted to stop Edwards in the courtroom, arrived, leading a band of freedom fighters, and Jon chose to die saving him rather than let the Invid kill him as per the parole agreement."

"I was betraying people to the Invid?"

"Yes and no. Like I said, Jon was committed to keeping his men alive, and the civilians that had flocked to the Wolfe Pack's camp in the vacuum created by the fall of the Southern Cross. At the time, there was no hope of successful resistance, and the loss of the next attack wave only confirmed that to most people. Military parole's an old concept, that went out of fashion around the time of the American Civil War. He laid down his arms, and agreed not to fight, to keep his people alive. It's actually a notion the Regis respected.

"However, part of the condition was that he had to agree to keep people in his territory from taking up arms against the Invid - including those that weren't actually under his control. The only way to do that was to remain an apparent beacon of resistance, then separate the sheep from the goats. If new arrivals were just getting supplies, and moving on, they were allowed to do so, and given escort out of the area, supposedly for their own protection. If they were looking to attack the hive, or cause trouble if they stayed, your counterpart and the Invid would stage attacks, where a few of his most trusted men would take the troublemakers to the hive, and the Invid would sacrifice a few of their own, targeting only those whose armor wasn't marked to identify them as Jon's personal team. In return, to make it seem like the mission was a success, they were given supplies to bring back. It cut him every time he did it, and he was in his own personal hell by the time Scott's band arrived, and had lost hope. The enormity of what he'd done hit, then, and he ended up saving Scott from the Invid, when Scott went in to rescue one of his own men. Ironically, in saving Bernard, he voided the agreement, and the town was destroyed.

"Your counterpart couldn't have known, but his sacrificing himself and his unit to save Bernard, saved Earth. It was the first time Scott had to deal with a situation that wasn't black or white, where doing the 'right' thing killed hundreds, after doing the 'wrong' thing had kept those same people alive for three years - and it was the man who had been his idol, that inspired him into uniform, that did it. As Scott traveled on to Reflex Point, he encountered other examples, but none as extreme as the fate of the Wolfe Pack and their dependents. By the time he got there, and experienced what seemed to be the ultimate betrayal - that of himself falling in love with a girl that turned out to be an amnesiac Invid spy in human form - he was more open to finding a way out of the war that didn't involve extinction of one or both sides. He and his girlfriend, now his wife, persuaded the Regis to leave Earth - and while leaving, destroy the doomsday weapons Reinhardt launched to sterilize Earth, in the Hunters' absence - yes, the SDF-3 misfolded on the return trip, too."

"What did he do to make them leave?"

"His unit, and the daughters of the Regis, showed her that she had become the same kind of monster as the Masters, in striking back at those she considered to be the heirs of the Masters. To paraphrase Nietzsche, she'd been staring into the Abyss too long, much as her REF opponents had, and it took the next generation to show them what they'd become, and how to back down.

"Frankly, I'd gotten pretty damn bitter about it myself, having lost a lot of friends. But, over time, it became apparent just how warped the REF had become since you and I left for Earth to fight the Invid, each with our own commands, and its state at the time of the liberation attempts. Some of the same council bastards you just saved, in a few years, would have ordered thousands of NEW ZENTRAEDI be created, from the genetics of the REF mission, brainwashed into thinking they were natural-born humans, and sent to Earth - most died, never setting foot on the world they THOUGHT was home. That same council ordered the Hunters to take doomsday weapons to Earth, and use them if the result of the battle for Earth was going to be anything other than total human victory, and stuck Reinhardt as the task force commander in charge of the weapons. He even had orders, that if it came to the point where launch was mandated, and the Hunters refused to destroy Earth, that he was to relieve them of command, and launch."

"Tell me which ones, and I can take care of that."

"You can't really act on 'what if' scenarios. The best scenario is to get those jokers back to Earth, where their political offices have been filled for a decade by others, and their time here makes them ineligible for office for years after their return due to residency rules. Let them be the terror of their neighborhood associations, not terrorizing the universe with their fascism."

"You know, the image of those hacks at the mercy of local politics, just warms the heart."

On the shuttle flight up, Minmei came back to Jon's seat.

"Jon, I guess you know part of what I'm going to say."

"Yeah... I'm really glad the two of you finally found each other again."

"Every relationship I've been in has been a total disaster. At least with Kyle, our original problems stemmed from unrealistic visions of how the world should be; and we've both gotten a lot wiser since then - the hard way. Perhaps it's time for you to mature as well."

"Huh?"

"Go back to Earth; find Catherine and Johnny. Man up and be the husband and father you should have been a decade ago. Even if she rejects you, at least make the effort. Too many people have screwed their lives up already. I've been given a second chance with a man that truly loves me; don't pass up any opportunity you get to put right your mistakes."

With that, Minmei turned, and went back to her seat in the other compartment.

"Wow," Jon uttered.

"Actually, though drugged and under the influence of Edwards at the time, she said almost the same thing to you in the other two universes where I was present for this day. Only then, it was meant to hurt you. In this time and place, it was meant as helpful advice, given freely. I will tell you, though - if you decide to act on it, it needs to be soon. Both Cathy and Johnny go MIA, presumed dead, on the last day of the Masters war. This means that you've got to act quicker than you did then."

"And, how do I do that?"

"Well, it should be quicker to replace the bridge section blown off the SDF-7 with the same component blocks off the one that's 90 percent complete, than have you wait for the latter to reach completion, like your counterparts had to do. That, and having my engineer tweak its fold system, should get you there about the same time as Carpenter. And, trust me, his arrival didn't go so well."

"How bad?"

"Ever see the schematics for the old Tyrolean colony ships? The ones that were flying bricks the size of Manhattan?"

"Yeah; never actually saw one."

"That's because the last time they were actually used to transport colonies was over a thousand years ago. The Masters pulled the last dozen or so out of mothballs to transport all their viable clones to Earth for the recovery of the Storage Matrix. After all, even blasted by the Zentraedi, Earth's ecosystem makes Tyrol's look like a parking lot by comparison. Each of those was outfitted with about the same weapon complement as a pair of Zent flagships, and about ten times more Bioroids than they had pilots for. They started out using partial clones not viable outside their containment as most their pilots, then started experimenting with captured Earth civilians brainwashed to serve the same function. By the end, they were only using sentient pilots, as they decided that quality worked better than quantity."

"Jesus."

"The Southern Cross managed to cripple their flagship, because my engineer figured out a vulnerability in their power system, back when he was still a hovertanker in the ATAC. Then, they modified their ships to eliminate that, before recovering that ship off the surface. They didn't lose one of those ships permanently until Carpenter's ship was crippled, and he abandoned ship after locking the autopilot on one of them. Louie's unit, led by Dana Sterling, boarded the enemy flagship a few weeks later, and managed to rig it to blow with the help of the last Zor clone, that had rebelled against the Masters after getting reeducated by Dana's unit; unfortunately, nearly all personnel had time to evacuate. Of the rest, most were reduced to skeleton crews and sick clones for the final battle, and the majority of healthy clones transferred to the new flagship. That one finished off the Southern Cross, but at the moment of their victory, Zor and Dana killed the Masters, and blew the ship over the ruins of Macross, in a vain attempt to keep the Invid from finding Earth."

"You're telling me the most effective unit in the war was-"

"Yes, Jon, it was a hovertank unit. You're perfectly within rights to feel vindicated."

"Now, will you tell me what REALLY happened back there in the cell block? You didn't have the type of weapons to do that to Adams and Edwards."

"Minmei killed them - not your Minmei, but my universe's Minmei."

"Then, where was she?'

"Her younger daughter is, well, special; for that matter, so's my son, and a few of my nieces. Your Sterlings' second daughter, due any day now, also falls into that category. Prolonged exposure to Protoculture has made the next generation of REF kids special, though Dana and other kids of Zentraedi are like that to an extent. And, back home, someone trying to alter our history from their own enhanced them even further. Minmei actually had her two-year-old teleport the two of them down from my ship, her own idea, to get her own form of vengeance on Edwards. In my universe, she was prisoner for almost a year on Optera, and was raped physically and mentally over the entire duration by Edwards. It took her years of counseling to recover from it. It's gonna be one hell of a shitstorm when I get back up there to deal with that."

"So, Captain Hunter; that was your wife that transmitted to the SDF-3, correct?"

"Yes, it was. When she realized the situation, she came up with the idea and ran with it."

"So, where did you pick up Fokker at, if you're from 2014?"

"I'll handle this, Rick. My family has a strange hobby. They like bringing the dead back to life. For example, my niece and my wife brought Fokker, Grant and the women of the bridge crew back to life on my world, and another niece did the same for Fokker on Rick's Earth. Of course, Roy was easy - he was put in cryogenic storage after he died of organ failure from blood loss, awaiting burial on Earth, then never was decanted, and left interred on the SDF-1. That system was still on emergency power as late as the SDF-3 launch. Portable storage canisters not quite as sophisticated were used on the SDF-1 bridge crew, and their frozen corpses were left on the bridge when the wreckage was buried. Both were well within the realm of recloning into living bodies with most of their memories. Hell, I'm even married to a clone one of my nieces made, though of a living person, not someone dead."

"Anyone I'd know?"

"Remember how I said there were a number of 'special' kids? My first niece was the strongest of the lot - in 2017. She aged to adulthood within six months, then cloned one of her kiddy friends to be an adult friend, after telepathically learning how to operate the machinery from Lang. Trust me, I was NOT pleased when I found out my girlfriend was a clone of my commanders' five-year-old, not to mention how Max reacted."

"Max? You married a clone of DANA?"

"You've not heard the half of it... I'll tell you when we have more free time. Rick's already heard it all, and I don't want to bore him retelling it."

The council was still rather shook up when Scott and the other two ship commanders made their entrance, and gave them a reaming out for letting Edwards go as long as they did. Scott then came over the top and hit them with the crimes of their future selves, from his universe. From there, he started bringing in evidence of some members' collusion with Edwards that led to this point, from their desire to get Lang and other moderates off the ruling council. This was facilitated by Marie, who had every teleporting adult in the fleet, including herself, going around to the places where such evidence was found in the council treason trials of 2035-2036, and gathering as much of the evidence as possible over the six hours leading up to the confrontation.

The result was devastating; one council member even had a heart attack when his actions were made public - a real one, since it was hard to fake it with a psychic doctor present (Noel), and she took care of it using her powers to force the clot the dissolve. By the time the night was through, those that had started the day thinking Edwards would save them, were dragged down with his fall - and didn't escape to poison the REF further, like they did elsewhere.

The first order of business was to try to call the Sentinels, to no avail. By this point, they were probably in transit to Peryton, and that whole region of space was a mess. In fact, it took almost two months to finally contact the local versions of the Hunters, by which time Wolfe had left on his repaired ship with some of the Dreamweaver personnel aboard. Also, the SDF-3's fold engines had been totally stripped down and rebuilt to Louis' standards, since his engineering crew and that of the other two SDFs had already done new fold engines for the latter two ships prior to the trip here, and in fact had built many of the parts needed before departing, based on what Scott told them his grand-niece said. The decision was made to move the discussion to Haydon IV aboard the SDF-2, which would give them the opportunity to sneak Noel and Louis into the planet-ship's guts and make Haydon's slumber an eternal one, and allow the Ark Angel to meet them under its own power. After an awkward round of introductions, the parties sat down to discuss the next step.


	5. Chapter 5

**REF Strategy Meeting:**

"I say we press on, and attack Optera!" Lron growled, in his argument to the assembled body of dimensional travelers, fellow Sentinels, REF, and Zentraedi.

"That won't stop the Regis from devastating Earth," Scott countered. "Most of the remaining Invid are with the Regis, and we never found out where she went after leaving Haydon IV, before she showed up over Earth a year after the Masters were defeated."

"There should be evidence of where she went, on Optera," Bela argued.

"No, there wasn't on my Optera, and there won't be here, either. The Regent hasn't spoken to the Regis directly since they split over what should be done about Tyrol. After that, it was only a few subspace transmissions, mostly to make sure the two didn't get into each other's way. All that going to Optera will do is get you some measure of revenge for what the Regent did to your worlds, and piss off the Regis when she finds out you've defiled the home planet. Furthermore, she has the ability, once the Regent is dead and she finds out, to bring all his surviving Invid to her, through any blockade we could set up. Simply, the Invid would turn to energy, and escape. It's why you CAN'T stop the Invid by destroying the world they're on, because as long as they have a leader and a few minutes, they can transform and be gone - something the council and much of the REF refused to accept in my universe, and they were willing to destroy Earth in a vain attempt to destroy the Invid. But, the truth is, the Invid don't HAVE to be destroyed."

"What is the alternative?" Veidt asked.

"It will take a lot of work, but what it comes down to is making them realize that the Masters are gone, and that we won't continue what the Masters started," Rem stated, now with much of the knowledge of Zor open to him. "We have to get the Regis back home to Optera, and help her undo the damage the Masters did to Optera; not just from Zor's attack, but the further damage done to keep Optera from regreening, that they inflicted before they realized that the plant would only grow correctly there. And, we have to get the Regent to eat some of the new mutant Fruit from Peryton, once the crops come in that started growing after the curse was lifted."

"It almost sounds like it would be easier just to destroy them," Crysta said, "but that would just be more violence and death on both sides. We don't have the manpower for a prolonged war, given that the only planets not rebuilding are Garuda and Haydon IV, and the Praxians have no home to go back to. And, it would require finding the Regis."

"That's why we need to get to Earth with sufficient force to force her to parlay."

"That's not guaranteed to work, either," the elder version of Emil Lang pointed out. "She could just charge through and take the Earth, then we'd have to try to persuade her to listen to us while we hold the orbitals."

"Then what do suggest?"

"We blockade Optera - not attack, just prevent the Regent from leaving with his forces. We then use a variation of the method our visitors used before the trip here - we send Colonel Bernard and his wife to find the Regis."

"And, this can work, why?" Learna asked.

"Because Marlene is an Invid princess transmuted into human form," Bernard said, moving to the table with his wife.

The reaction of the group was pandemonium. Several of the aliens reached for non-present weapons, and the Perytonian delegation started making warding sigils in the air.

"NOW, CUT THAT OUT!" Scott Freeman shouted, pulling the only weapon in the room (an antique M1911 fitted for blanks, but the aliens didn't know that) and firing a .45 blank into the ceiling. "You all are acting like a bunch of new Zentraedi clones in a titty bar - no offense, Breetai."

"None taken."

"Marlene was an Invid; now she's human. In fact, she's undergone further mutation to become completely human, other than the fact that she can still communicate with Invid telepathically, and can probably use that to home in on the Regis. But, that will require a lot of folding around to triangulate, or stumble close enough to where she can make mental contact. If you're still concerned, it was Marlene and her sister that helped convince the Regis on my world to leave Earth, and destroy the weapons that were launched by a fanatic to sterilize the planet in an attempt to kill the Invid. So, yes, I'd trust her with my life, because she already saved my life once, saved Earth, when she didn't have to. Oh, and there's evidence to indicate that the Invid and their Flower of Life might actually be Earth life forms, modified and transported to Optera by Haydon. That kind of scheming is why we must stop this fighting, to end Haydon's meddling with our races to serve his own twisted ends. I'm calling a two hour recess, to allow you all to grab a meal, and get to know Marlene."

When everyone regrouped, things were more settled. It was decided that Breetai and and Lron would lead the remaining Zentraedi, a force of Sentinels (mostly Karbarran & Praxian), and REF to blockade Optera, as the Regent's last ships of the line had been destroyed over Peryton. They'd tell the Regent to call his mate for talks to restore Optera, but they figured he'd be too stubborn to do it - and unwilling to launch attacks out to the high orbits that would allow the primary weaponry of the blockade ships to annihilate the transport before they could make it half way to their targets.

Meanwhile, Scott & Marlene Bernard would lead another group, this mostly of ambassadors from the various worlds, in a search pattern roughly in the direction of Earth, towards the region the Invid were believed to have gone. Somewhere in that space, the Regis regathered her troops, sent out nebula-shaped sensors to search for Earth, and would eventually try to call the Regent's Invid to her, for the final trip there.

The last group, the largest, would be the three SDFs and the Dreamweaver, as they would attempt to fold to Earth and get there before the end of the war with the Masters; the uncertainty in dates left this in doubt. Hopefully, Jon Wolfe, Ron "Lewis" and the others that left on the Tsushima weeks earlier would get there on time, and possibly affect the course of the conflict, even if the SDFs didn't.

Dimension 3, End of the Second Robotech War (2030):

"So, when are we?" Marie Freeman asked.

"The battle at ten o'clock should answer your question, sister of mine," Dana replied. The port screen shifted and magnified into a battle between several mid-sized interplanetary defense shuttles and one of the few surviving Tyrolean escort destroyers, with AJACS and Bioroids having to dodge ship-to-ship fire as much as shots at each other. "We're too late to stop the battle, and the Masters' command vessel is already descending towards the mounds. Several assault craft and an escape pod are en route from it to the surface."

"Captain to Medical Bay; is Noel suited up?"

"I'm ready to go, Uncle; just give the word," Noel replied from the cockpit of the hostile environment rescue mecha, an obscenely up-armored, non-transformable version of the old Garland mecha tested by the Southern Cross fifteen years earlier.

"It'll be too close to call, to try to intercept Zor. Go for your alternate target, and get him back to the regeneration chamber."

"On my way," Noel said, as her comm line went dead, cut off by her teleport. Odds are, by the time the unit's radio frequency-hopped to find a way through the shielding of the mothership to reestablish the radio link, she'd have her target and be on the way back. That, or she'd be teleporting out of her suit directly back, as the ship blew up around her - which she almost didn't survive the last time.

"Dana is going to need someone shortly," the mission's Dana replied. "Request permission to go groundside."

"Granted."

Dana disappeared, in the blink of an eye.

"Wow - I didn't expect her to do that," Marie said. "Normally, you can't get her to teleport short distances, let alone from lunar orbit."

"Remember just how traumatic this was for Sis," Aurora pointed out. "She'll do anything that she can do to help her counterpart through it. Then, there's the Zand factor."

"What's our current plan, Captain?" Bowie asked from the weapons console, having jumped up to cover the position after Dana teleported out. He was fervently hoping that Noel could pull off her mad gamble, and that events and locations were as they were back home.

"Broadcast to both sides that Zor Prime has killed the Masters, and that continuing the bloodshed is futile. Fire a warning shot as close as you can to that furball with one of the main guns, without actually hitting anyone, at your discretion. Since, by this point, neither side had anything left resembling that sort of heavy weaponry, that should get their attention."

"One finger of God, on its way..." It took Bowie about a minute to find a clear vector, but when he did, he immediately fired, then hit the toggle switch on the hand control for his communications headset.

"Attention surviving Southern Cross and Tyrolean combatants, this is an order from the REF forces and their allies in the reformed Tyrolean Republic. Stand down, withdraw, and await further orders. Zor Prime has killed the Masters aboard their flagship, and the REF and the Tyrolean reserve forces left behind on Tyrol have been allies for six years. Further fighting is pointless, and there is still the danger that a third hostile race, the Invid, may show up."

Bowie looked over to his station, where Allegra was giving a similar message in High Tiresian, as she should be known to the commanders of the surviving forces as not having defected like Musica - of course, this universe's Allegra's fate was unknown. She could be dead, having caught the shot that Octavia took for her sister, or riding that flagship down on its death plunge, and their own universe's Noel (who had no counterpart here) too occupied with retrieving Rolf's corpse. That the local versions of herself and Octavia were probably dead and irretrievable didn't seem to bother her at all - then again, she was the clone of someone that had died many years before, and a secondary clone at that. Death came with the territory, and her muse triad wasn't even the first attempt to clone the original Musica - just the first (and only) ones to actually bond as a triad, after the individual clone attempts were found lacking from too much manipulation of their psyche.

As if to punctuate the matter, as he was starting to repeat the order, the Masters' ship blew up over the mounds. He stopped, bit his lip, and waited.

"Tyler to bridge - the package has arrived safely, and is being prepped for emergency recloning. Noel says she could see the blast waves moving toward her down the corridor, when she jumped back here."

"It was definitely better than my view last time," Noel piped in from the background.

"Actually, wasn't your view last time entirely blocked by the back of a Bioroid?"

"Well, sorta; but I was also sorta a back-seat passenger in my own mind at that point, with that failsafe protocol Karen left in my head calling the shots. And, the last thing I actually remember seeing was that parts of the Bioroid were becoming translucent from the high-end radiation from the explosion passing through it, and the force field that got thrown up around me and the Bioroid by the guardian, even as we started to teleport out. You don't expect to survive looking straight down a point-blank nuclear blast THROUGH a mecha, as if you were looking at an eclipse with a welding helmet on. It's like that joke from the Global War - 'What was the last thing that went through the mind of the Jerusalem nuke bomber?' The answer is 'Plasma'."

"Girl, that's one pretty morbid joke," Marie commented.

"I get it from the person that made me that way. I just wish Karen had given us a little more time on arrival, so that I could have tried to talk the two Zors floating around in his head down from the ledge."

Dana stood quietly on the hillock, Polly in her arms, overlooking the results of Zor Prime's vain sacrifice. He promised her he'd make she and the others safe, but if what that madman said was true, he'd only made things a thousand times worse...

"Actually," an oddly familiar voice said from behind her, "Zor Prime didn't realize he was being manipulated by the memories of the original Zor, that got implanted on the ship. Zor had sent the ship to Earth with the intent of Humanity becoming the Invid's allies against the Masters, only he saw in Zor Prime's mind that we'd almost become as bad as the Masters, so decided to give Earth to them. Of course, he didn't know the Invid had also fallen far as well."

She turned around, and saw the speaker; a woman that appeared to be an older version of herself; and the new senses that were unfolding in her mind after her conflict with Zand confirmed that the woman was exactly what she appeared to be.

"How?"

"I'm a dimensional traveler; part of a mission to contact parallel worlds. Your universe is the second one we've found, though we found the REF first, before coming to Earth."

"I wish you could have come here first."

"Me, too. I've had to live much of what you're feeling right now, though unlike you, I had a foster sister that nearly died trying to save Zor from the explosion."

"Did she succeed or fail?"

"She did it, but at great cost to herself. She has powers like the ones that started awakening in you when you caught the matrix, and that Zand opened further in his assault on you. Only, Noel's powers are much greater than ours, and she had some practice with them after hers were awakened around the time that the 15th picked up Major Carpenter from the escape pod. Even so, they weren't really enough. She saved Zor, but it took another miracle to save her, as she actually grabbed him, Bioroid and all, as he blew up the ship, and teleported them both out of the explosion."

"Teleported?"

"Think of it as a form of personal space fold. Yeah, you will be able to do it too, eventually - it took me the better part of two years to learn how to do it myself, and it still creeps me out when I do it. In fact, I did it from my ship, down here to you, when I realized we weren't in time to save Monument City or Zor. I knew you'd need some support, since Mom and Dad are stuck on the far side of the galaxy on an artificial planet created by the asshole that engineered the roots of all that conflict that psycho was ranting about." Dana pointed over at the plant that used to Lazlo Zand.

"Will they be safe there?"

"Pretty much; a lot safer than we are. We sent out someone to find the Invid, but we don't know yet if the Invid will listen to reason, or just charge in here like they did back home, killing those that resist and enslaving the rest."

"Are the Invid really as bad as Musica and Zand let on?"

"At heart, not really. But they've been violated to the edge of environmental destruction and genocide by the Masters, and you personally should know how some people respond to that, from our own experiences being half-Zentraedi." The younger Dana fidgeted a bit at those memories being brought up, as the older one continued. "They've lashed out in the worst possible way, and the way they had to fight a guerrilla war since then has only poisoned minds on both sides. Even though the Masters are gone, back home it took four more years of fighting, and a group of young humans and even younger Invid, to convince the Regis that she had become the same kind of monster as the Masters - and that in forsaking that violence, she could give both the Invid and Humanity the chance to start over."

"But, for now..."

"For now, though, they still burn with desire for vengeance - one half of them did so more than the other, and it led to its near-destruction at the hands of the REF and the former subjects of the Masters. Even though the Regis predicted it would happen, it still hardened her heart, as those that fell were still her mate and his half of their children."

"So, Zor really died for nothing?"

"In an odd sort of way, he died for something, but it was really for something he would have not have condoned. His intent was to do penance for his sins, but it only made things worse. He was steered that way by Haydon, who will not have his way here if we can help it. I'd offer to let my Zor donate the cells to create a new Zor for you, but it really wouldn't be the same, and I don't think your Zor would have approved; mine's changed a lot in the last decade."

"But, you really haven't," the local Dana countered. "You're acting so brave, but it IS an act, isn't it? You're here to face your own demons, as much as you are for me. Don't deny it."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Dana replied. "Ten years; yet you don't have any children. Don't ask me how I know, I just do. Why?"

"I don't know. First there was his recovery; then there was the war with the Invid. But, that ended six years ago. Even Aurora's a mother now, believe it or not. But, I'm not, and there's no biological reason with either Zor or me to explain it."

"I think I might; these abilities are much more than you think they are. But, you've denied them, as much as you've denied your hopes, fears, and pains, which is why they don't come as natural to you as your cousins - or, apparently, to me, since I've not had a chance to reject them. Aren't we a pair? It really started with our denying the full extent of our feelings for Zor, not acting on them early enough to matter - and that led both of us to this hillside, in our own time. But, you had a reprieve - but that only allowed you to bottle up your feelings even tighter. You, me... we both have to stop denying ourselves, playing the Stoic inside while putting on the flighty act that everyone expects of us. We've got to stop denying our true selves." With that, the younger Dana embraced her counterpart, both of them breaking into tears.

"Don't cry, Aunt Dana."

"Wha-" the two looked, and a young boy stood there, seemingly from nowhere.

"Mom was worried about you; you've not responded to hails."

"Mom?"

"Dana, this is my nephew, Steven. His mother was an adult clone made of me made when I was five; an accidental byproduct of 'Flower-boy' over there kidnapping me and Noel for experiments - something that probably never happened to you, at least not like it did for me."

"There's something... Zand trying to awaken my powers, he claimed. Rolf rescuing me, while my parents were fighting the Malcontents."

"Like I said, it was quite different for me."

Steven looked around; everyone still treated him as a little kid. And, perhaps he might be, in some ways. But, much like his cousin Karen, he (and a lot of the others, like Karen's own little sisters) were more mature than the age they appeared on the outside - let alone what the calendar said (which was often a fraction of their physical appearance). Emotions were perhaps the area where he was weakest, but telepathy among him and his peers brought that a lot farther than anyone expected. Emotions which led him to act on his mother's worries, without permission, and now to contemplate something even more risky than a orbital teleport, because his aunt Dana and her younger duplicate were sad.

Before he was born, Karen had given his parents a collection of videos and books from other worlds, where the story of the SDF-1 and its heirs had been fictional stories. For various reasons, those materials (which had been dropped off in the middle of the night, with no one actually seeing Karen) had been classified black - only a handful of people in the post-Invid RDF even knew they existed, and most of those had come over to the Freeman household to study them, under the cover of poker games, kid's pool parties, etc. He, of all people, wasn't supposed to know anything about them. But, once again, he was a telepath - and once he found out about them, he managed to get into the safe they were stored in, and study them.

One of the books talked about the place that the SDF-3 had gotten trapped in, temporarily - and how the children of the SDF-3 got them out (since they didn't have Karen to help them). That otherworldly incident involved a dozen or more kids retrieving something temporally, but not only did they do it in a space between realities, the object was something the size of a small shuttle - and, truthfully, it wasn't even the right item they were looking for, but close enough. His intended target was much smaller, much more recent... and much closer.

If he was going to try it, he'd need an external power source for it. The two Danas wouldn't be enough - besides, they had already drained a lot of their potential. His eyes shifted up the hill... That will do.

"Steven, what are you doing? Stay away from that monster!"

He ignored his aunt, and reached into her counterpart's mind, to that last moment aboard the ship. He had the target, and the exterior power source, lacking a gestalt. He hoped this would work; otherwise, it could get messy. He placed his hand on the massive flower...

{I don't know if you're still sane in here, you bastard, but I hope you appreciate the mercy I'm giving you, even it's the ultimate denial of your plans}, Steven thought, reaching into the energies of the plant that was once Lazlo Zand. The plant withered brown, then crumbled to dust, as Steven began glowing brightly with the stolen energy. He then reached back, and up, using the psychic traces with Dana combined with the book and video descriptions of the moment he was trying so desperately to change.

Contact - then blackness...

The two Danas started running up the hill when they saw Steven reaching for the plant, but were too far to reach him. When he started glowing, it made them stop short, anyway - the last time the older Dana saw someone glow like that, it was Karen and the Regis, at Reflex Point. Then, there was the explosion, that knocked them both off their feet.

As they struggled to their feet, they could see a crater where Steven had been standing, and they ran, panicking and calling his name. They crested the edge of the hole...

...and found that the boy wasn't the only person there. He looked as if he was a rag doll, tossed to the side of the hole, but it was obvious that he'd actually been blown upward, then fell back to his position, after the explosion. At the center of the crater was another body, similarly storm-tossed, but much older.

The older Dana went to her nephew, and was relieved to find him breathing, and actually starting to regain consciousness.

"What have you done?"

"I wanted you to stop crying, Aunt Dana...Did I do something wrong?"

Dana looked over to her counterpart, who was holding the other person to her chest. That person, too, was beginning to stir.

"I guess it runs in the family... Don't EVER do something like that again, at least not without asking for help AND permission first. But yeah, you did good, kid."

"You're still crying."

"Yeah, I guess I am; but it's a different kind of crying. Are you hurt?"

He reached up, touched her, and some of his color came back as he nudged her healing powers into working on him. "Not much; too tired to stand, though. Can you carry me?"

"Sure, you little rascal. By the way, just how did you do that?"

"Ask Mom about the kids in _The End of the Circle_."

"I'll pretend I didn't just hear that - I only know enough about that book to know that very bad things happened to my counterpart in it, and that's all your parents ever told me about it. How did YOU know about it?"

"Since when did being told something was off-limits ever stop you as a kid?"

"Good point."

They got over to the other Dana, as Zor Prime finally started shaking off the effects of the concussion he had, at least until the younger Dana's unconscious use of her own awakening powers took care of it.

"Dana... How did I get here? And... why are there two of you?"

"That's a long story... It's funny - my Zor said the same thing when he first woke up."


	6. Chapter 6

Ten minutes later, Steven was back on his feet, leading the two Danas (supporting Zor between them) toward the nearest concentration of survivors. So intent were the women on keeping Zor on his feet, that they didn't notice that Steven had led them into the middle of a group of grounded assault ships, ones different than the group the 15th ATAC had flown down in.

"Fancy meeting you here," a voice called from the doorway of one of the nearest craft.

"Ron?"

"Yeah; I managed to get into town yesterday - too late to stop the chaos. After all, who would believe me, after Jon ran off to South America without me to try to save his family?"

"So, how did you end up here?"

"Well, I was able to convince one person, though it took most the night to do it. As a result, we persuaded him to order the evacuation hours earlier, and to come with us."

"You mean..."

"Greetings, Major Sterling, and Lieutenant Sterling," Anatole Leonard called out, emerging with Ron's two young sons, one in each arm. "I'm glad to see you no worse for wear, Lieutenant, although I'm a bit surprised to see Zor with you. Hirano said that he would be the one blowing up the mothership, and there probably wouldn't be a way to save him if your counterpart's fleet arrived too late to stop the explosion."

"After all I've been through, I'm tempted to frag you right here, if it wasn't for the kids."

"Heel, little sister. He's still your superior officer, and he had nothing to do with Zand. In fact, Zand's manipulations typically came down to him via orders from the civilian leadership or from vague communications from lackeys, coupled with blackmail. He's as much a victim as you, as my friend Ron can vouch for. After all, Ron's counterpart died here in the same month Zand first tried to violate you."

"But, all those deaths...?"

"They probably would have happened, regardless. If the 'Supreme Commander' had stood up against Zand's commands, the council would have replaced him with someone even less willing to work with Emerson. In fact, one of the few people that seemed to be immune to direct manipulation by Zand was Uncle Rolf - and after every attempt to remove him from the equation failed, Zand stopped trying, feeling that the same fate driving him must have also had a purpose for Rolf's continued existence. That's why he waited until he sensed Rolf's passing in orbit, to make another attempt on you."

"Dana, did Noel's backup plan work?" Hirano asked.

"Yes and no. She retrieved Rolf's body, but didn't have time to save Zor- my nephew here pulled an insanely dangerous stunt, to save him - and will probably be grounded until the next century for doing it."

"Let's see grounding work on a someone who can teleport," Steven commented.

Dana rolled her eyes. "The genes do show, don't they? He may be the son of my clone, but he sure takes after me."

Steven grinned devilishly, as he levitated himself a few inches off the ground.

"Before you bring up Rolf's death, Dana, that's what my cousin was doing when Zor here was trying to blow up the ship. We didn't have a firm timeline, so the backup plan if we arrived after you'd left the ship, was to send Noel after Rolf, first, then go after Zor. We took an advanced version of the sizing chamber the Masters created for the Zentraedi, and advanced the technology even further in the last decade, once protoculture supplies weren't an issue. As long as someone's brain is intact, and relatively fresh, we can restore them to life as easily as changing the size of a Zentraedi; it works wonders on restoring missing body parts, too."

"Lieutenant, let me apologize for all the hell I put you through," Leonard spoke up. "One of the reasons I was so hard on you, and your unit, was that my son died at the hands of your mother. You lived, but Hirano died. The persons that kidnapped Hirano's mother, and made her believe that I was behind it, actually worked for Zand. The baby was supposed to be used to blackmail me, but Seloy escaped, and the resulting chaos that she fed working on that belief served Zand just as well."

"Hirano was your son?" The younger Dana was shocked.

"Yes," the older Dana answered." In fact, one of the reasons why the Southern Cross expanded from just being the remnants of the Brazilian Army and the world forces based at the Grand Cannon site, into a hemispheric, then global, force, was so that Leonard could look for his son, whom Seloy had kept hidden after her escape. By the time of the Brasilia Massacre, she had felt emboldened enough to become more public - only to have it backfire, and she ended up back in the jungle again. What really happened that day is still argued, other than that the order to open fire on the crowd did not come from any legitimate authority."

Hirano continued. "I spoke to your mother before the fold here, Dana, and when she found out who I was, the great Miriya Sterling broke down and cried like a little girl. She'd still been bottling up all her guilt over what happened back then. Miriya tried to confront Seloy over the attacks on humans, which had been escalated to a form of designer biochemical weapon delivered by robot bugs, that turned the infected into psychotic killers until it wore off - if they survived the stresses that were put on their bodies by the stuff. When it was apparent that Seloy was too far gone, Miriya tried to shoot her - only to have my counterpart jump in the way and take the bullets meant for his mother; it appeared to Miriya that he was just trying to get between the two of them to stop the argument, not to shield his mother, which made it even more tragic. That, of course, snapped what few threads of sanity remained in my mother's counterpart, and Miriya barely managed to kill Seloy and escape with her life."

"Mom... killed Hirano?"

"Yes. Truthfully, it was better that way. While Seloy would have never intentionally harmed her son, had she succeeded in her plan, he would died anyway. Who knows how crazy that would have driven her - she was rumored to have recovered the Artemis Array that the UEDC built before the Zentraedi arrived, that was designed to divert asteroid Apophis into a safer orbit using multiple reflex warheads used as thrusters. That's dozens of huge nukes - just missing fuel. Apophis was mined into raw material for the RDF fleet after Dolza using modified Zentraedi ships, so it was never used.

"Anyway, Seloy had forgotten that the placental barrier meant that none of us half-Zentraedi had protoculture traces in our systems, at least not naturally. Zand MIGHT have injected you artificially, just in case Seloy succeeded, much like he'd imbibed the Flower of Life himself. It was Zand that had provided Seloy, through intermediaries, the location of that biochemical weapon, which had been developed by the Neasians during the global war, and was being secretly tested in Africa. He also supplied the data needed to make the robotic injector bugs and the sensors that allowed them to tell the difference between humans and full Zentraedi by sensing the protoculture traces. The stuff never got used on my world, thank God, but my Louis managed to recover Zand's archives before we left the ruins of Monument, and he'd decrypted them and found out a lot of the secrets behind the really bad things that happened in the 20 years between the destruction of Macross and Monument."

"Maybe Steven draining all of Zand's life force to save Zor was too good a fate for him."

"You won't get an argument from me," the elder Dana replied. "He was Invid food back home, and I thought even that was too quick, even though he had to live a year as a plant in sensory deprivation before that happened."

About an hour later, the rest of the survivors from the battle aboard the mothership arrived, looking for Dana. Bowie was initially as furious to see Leonard as Dana was initially, but when he was told that Rolf had been recovered and was being revived, he calmed down a bit, though still a bit mistrusting of the "supreme commander".

At this point, Leonard was just another survivor, and whose command status was in serious doubt. Not only was Leonard technically one of Lisa's subordinates (even if he'd reorganized most of the RDF into the second Southern Cross after Edwards' betrayal), he had technically only been the commander at the direction of the UEG council. When Ron had convinced him to start the civilian evacuation six hours earlier than elsewhere, before the Tyroleans began their attack on the city, they'd ordered his removal. This didn't have any real effect on the military; after all, he'd arranged to have those with suspect loyalty transferred to Emerson's attack forces for the last two assaults (and he made sure to get rid of the political lackeys in the same purge as most of Emerson's supporters).

But, while the council had to waste time trying to drag in someone from Europe or Asia to replace him, he in turn seized the communications networks, detained the local political apparatus (many of which willingly complied, once they found out the reason for his orders), and made sure that at least locally, his evacuation order wasn't countermanded. Colonel Fredericks and the GMP managed to get a much more orderly evacuation underway, and when the assault did arrive, the drugged-up clones hit a mostly empty town, with only the Civil Defense forces left, as well as the small fraction of population that ignores any evacuation order. The CD forces did their best to evade and retreat out of town, once the evacuation gave way to combat. After all, the evacuation alert was the type for pending reflex weapon attack, which was all too true.

Some of the conventional assault ships and bioroids strafed the rear guard areas of the southwestern and southern evacuation paths where the GMP had concentrated their mecha, since the primary evacuation paths in that direction went through the former parkland that surrounded the military target of Fokker Field. The primary evacuation was to the east along the old I-90 corridor, and it was virtually untouched. Fredericks and the local politicians were with that group, and it was moving slowly in the direction of the Sioux Falls military vehicle depot (which had started sending out fuel trucks when the evacuation was ordered). From there, they'd divide into smaller groups, and most would continue to Granite City, New Chicago, and New Detroit.

As the night went on, the GMP, CDU and other military personnel left behind slowly filtered into the area to the northwest of Monument, along the abandoned US Highway 212 that for two short years almost 20 years prior, had been widened to become the most heavily traveled road in North America, running between the fledgling cities of Monument and New Macross. The two clusters of assault ships that had abandoned ship after following the 15th to salvation, had settled down on opposite sides of the highway, along the part of the road that cut through what had once been the northeast corner of Wyoming, and it was there that surviving clones from the devastation in Monument were brought, having stopped fighting when Zor Prime and Dana took out the Clone Masters in the command center of the ship, and slowly coming out of their drug-induced near-mindless state as the night progressed. Many were in shock from the totally alien (to them) surroundings they woke up in, and it took the bravest of the clones that had followed Musica to safety going out with the patrols into the carnage, to go in and gather their people.

Morning saw the arrival of supplies and personnel from the SDFs and the Dreamweaver, as well as transports to take those wanting to go back up to orbit, where one of the Masters colony ships was still functional, but in dire need of repair. While conditions would be rough on it, many clones would feel more comfortable there, and the ship needed more people familiar with the technology to help with the repairs.

In the afternoon, Leonard was taken to the Dreamweaver, where he and Emerson were debriefed, and filled in on what had occurred on the SDF-3 mission. Attempts were made to get persons from the Far East and European Sectors of the UEG, but they were just as bone-headed here as back home - even more so since they considered Leonard as being relieved of command, and having refused to protect the majority of the government that blindly stayed in Monument to get incinerated - as if he could have somehow stopped the attack from the Masters' gunship after the enemy had achieved total aerial superiority. This led to Noel and a much more confident Dana going in and forcibly taking the recalcitrant politicos to orbit by force.

It took a bit longer to get representatives from the independents, and to finally make contact with Cavern City. Jon Wolfe had gone there with his unit, after leaving Hirano and his family outside Monument. After confronting his ex-wife, who wasn't really all that thrilled to see him, and apologizing for his stupidity, he took on the defense of the city, whether she wanted him to or not. He sent the civil defense fighter squadron from Cavern City to back up his son's unit in one of the coastal districts, while having the two fighter squadrons from his composite battalion take its place.

When the Masters did attack, the battle at Cavern City was much more drawn out than in the Freeman's universe, primarily from the different composition of the city defense forces resulting from the Wolfe Pack returning home. When the smoke cleared, Cavern City was still underground, but the Wolfe Pack had taken severe losses, including its commander. Wolfe had taken on the assault ship that, in other universes, blown open the cavern roof. His Alpha had trouble targeting it, so, when he managed to actually catch it and grab hold right before it was going to fire, he blasted his way into it at point blank range, and climbed inside. Unfortunately, the power plant onboard a gunship variant was much more unstable (and powerful) than that of regular assault ship, and it blew up when it attempted to fire, from the damage he was inflicting inside. Without the gunship, the battle became one of attrition, until the Masters' forces retreated on hearing of the destruction of their commanders.

On the other hand, the addition of the additional air forces helped swing the battle on the coast, to where the defenders won with minimal losses, since bioroids were most vulnerable to missile attacks. Wolfe's actions had saved his son and ex-wife, as well as his home, but at the cost of his life.

When all of the governments finally were represented, talks began once more, and preparations made. After all, no one knew as yet if the Bernards would be as successful here as they were on their first stop, in persuading the Invid to stand down. They had to prepare for the worst, while doing the cat-herding that was post-Masters diplomacy.

Captain's Log, Ark Angel (translated from the Karbarran):

"The crew is starting to get unruly from all the waiting; Bela reports the same from the Tokugawa. The only reason why things haven't exploded seems to be the team sports the humans introduced. Every ship has its own internal leagues for basketball, and, I kid not, THREE different Earth sports ALL called "Football", but with little in common with each other than the rough size of their play areas. It says much about our peoples that, the crews play the latter three are played on bare hangar decking, instead of the artificial ground surface the humans had for the games when they introduced them. Yet, even with those outlets, the fights on the field of play and intentional causing of injury have increased, especially in interspecies games.

"The Zentraedi crews seem to be a bit more laid back; perhaps because they are getting a lot more 'recreation' than the rest of us. Karbarran crews are mostly male, Praxians, are, well, what they are - and dare I say it, every bit a match for the typical male Karbarran or Zentraedi in strength and toughness. Once it was found out that Breetai and Kazianna were expecting, without even being micronized, it seems sex became the primary off-duty activity on the Valivarre. In the last year, the number of Zentraedi in the fleet has doubled, but there's been no cloning, and all the new arrivals are in diapers, not uniforms. Just saying that would have been unimaginable in the days of the Empire.

"Now, even the Regent has gone quiet; perhaps our blockade has finally pushed the Invid into energy conservation mode, since they lost their food imports from our worlds, and had their underground gardens optimized for mecha fuel; it's not sufficient to supply their food needs even if put completely over to that use. The only activity seems to be the Inorganics, and they aren't shifting patrol patterns anymore. As it is, I think that we confused the Regent's tiny mind when we surrounded Optera and didn't attack, only fighting to defend ourselves and prevent traffic - not that there's been anyone coming in since Peryton was liberated.

"Tomorrow, we will finally assault the surface - and hopefully, not fly into a trap. Scouts will use the cloaked reconnaissance fighters that the dimensional travelers provided us to lead the way, and hopefully keep us from too many blunders."

"Captain, the scouts have broken radio silence."

"What? So soon?" Lron fumed.

"They say to call off the attack; it's not needed. The Invid are gone."

"HOW?"

"They don't know. All the Invid mechs are standing empty - as if the pilots disappeared from them while in mid-step. Some appear to have even fallen in stride, or out of the air. And, all their spacecraft are still parked where they were last seen."

"Are you sure they aren't just in hibernation?"

"Even the hives and gardens are unmanned."

"Breetai is so going to not like this." Then again, Lron thought, at least Kazianna can rest easy knowing that Breetai won't be suicidally leading the charge like he did in other universes, and according to their visitors, he only survived in some universes because others sacrificed themselves to save him - and without those, he died in a suicidal embrace with the Regent.

Two months after the Masters' defeat, Marie Freeman gave birth to her daughter, whom she named Allison. However, what should have been a joyful time was filled with apprehension. The Soviets, much like their counterparts back home, could not be convinced that the Invid existed, let alone were a potential threat, and there was still no word from the Bernards.

Two more months passed, and the only result was that the world was polarized into two factions - those who believed in the possibility of an Invid invasion, and those that denied the race's existence, or at least that it was a threat. Despite the apparent strategic advantage of four SDF-class ships in orbit, those opposed to their warnings seemed to be edging closer and closer to resistance, if not outright war, against the RDF, and they even attempted to nationalize the surviving RDF & ASC forces that had been stationed on their soil prior to those ships' arrival; and more often than not, those forces responded by taking their toys and moving to where they'd follow the chain of command they'd signed up for - in some cases, having to fight their way out. Things were getting insane.

Scott was woken by the alert claxons going off, and he scrambled to the bridge while still getting dressed.

"What's the situation, Angie?" He asked, relieving Dante, who had been the senior bridge officer for the watch.

"We've got multiple tracks coming in from deep space."

"The Invid?"

"That's the question. The tracks are coming in on completely different directions from each other, and neither match the data from the Invid arrival back home, in either direction, or nature of the returns. Of course, that doesn't mean anything here."

"How soon till you can get a visual identification?"

"I've launched fold probes. They should pop in any second, and give us visuals from a few million miles out."

"Let me know when you get more data. Have you alerted the other ships?"

"Yes, sir. I contacted them to confirm our readings, before ordering the alert. Visuals coming in now... One of the inbounds is a fleet of unidentified class ships, being led by an SDF-7 class vessel. Suggest we tag this as possibly being the Bernard mission, but we'll need to contact them. The other is... Captain, you better take a look at this."

Angie transferred the image to the main screen, and set the IFF to re-run the visual classification.

"Another SDF-3? Where the hell did that come from?"

"Should I hail them?" Bowie asked, having showed his usual regard for military authority, and standing at his station in his uniform top, pajama bottoms and pollinator slippers, his uniform pants and shoes on his console so that he could change into them as he got the chance.

"As long as you stay off-camera."

"I am kinda out of uniform, aren't I?"

"Kinda?"

"Unidentified SDF-3 class vessel, this is the Dimensional Exploration Ship Dreamweaver, in orbit over Earth. Please identify yourself."

"This is Admiral Lisa Hayes Hunter, in command of the SDF-3. Our sensors indicate a modified Zentraedi Scout is part of your vessel. By any chance is there a Scott Freeman aboard your vessel?"

"I'll take it from here, Bowie. Put me on the main screen - narrow focus, for obvious reasons." Scott sat down in his command chair. "This is General Scott Freeman, commander of the Earth Dimensional Corps. I gather from you knowing my name, that I was a guest of yours over Garuda and Haydon IV?"

"You are correct, though it was one of my bridge crew that recognized the Korra'ti as the core of your vessel."

A split screen popped up. "You're looking good, brother. I guess you made it home all right after all."

"Jan?"

"I guess it's been longer for you than it has been for us."

"Quite a bit. We rebuilt this ship into this form over 20 years after our return home; fates conspired to keep us from putting most of the information we brought back to use, and we ended up fighting Edwards all over again here, then the Invid on Earth. The world below is the second Earth we've contacted on our maiden voyage."

"This is our first stop on ours," Lisa added. "It looks like Earth had a rough time here. We used the data gathered from studying and repairing your ship, to develop fold systems that got us home in time to force the Masters to come to the table for negotiations, though we still ended up having to launch a decapitation raid against them when they tried to use the talks as a cover to raid the Macross ruins. The Invid arrived a couple years later, and managed to seize the Earth by bypassing the fleet. We sent emissaries from orbit, instead of trying to drive them off, and persuaded them to go home with the promise to help them rebuild."

"Speaking of which, we've got what we think are the local Invid coming in from a nearly opposite vector from you, that we sent some of our people to talk down from their frenzy."

"Who did you send? Zor Prime? Rem?"

"Actually, Scott Bernard. Things went really bad on our Earth, with the Masters and Southern Cross destroying each other, and he ended up as one of the few survivors of an REF mission to liberate Earth. He ended up fighting his way to the Invid Regis, only to find that his girlfriend was an amnesiac Invid simulagent, who in turn defended humanity in front of her mother, and convinced the Regis that the Invid were just as wrong in their actions on Earth as the Masters had been for their actions against the Invid. The Invid left, saving Earth from a lunatic that launched a planetary sterilization attack after the SDF-3 never arrived from a misfold. Scott and his Invid wife, as a result, were the perfect choice for Invid ambassadors, and have already done it once on our trip, already."

"Seeing as you have an SDF-1 and SDF-2 with you, I think I can guess the time period of your first stop."

"Yeah, arriving just in time to blow Khyron to bits."

"We'll speed up and join you in Earth orbit, just in case your diplomacy failed, and the other group of ships is hostile."

"That will be fine. It will be easier to catch you up in person."

The other fleet, indeed, turned out to be the Invid. They were arriving already in the process of taking human form, after the Regis and Marlene/Ariel had a long telepathic talk. The primary reason for the delay in communications on arrival was that the Regis was still in the process of getting the Regent cured of his Peryton-curse-triggered insanity, and converted into a more humanoid form.

The Invid set up temporary homes on the mostly-deserted Indian subcontinent, from which they would travel back to Optera to restore that world to its original state. In some ways, the Invid had come full circle, back to their ancestral homelands, and it was apparent that many of them would not return to Optera when it was restored.

While this went on, the four Earths represented talked about their pasts, presents, and possible futures. While trade and immigration might not be a viable option for a decade or more, the groundwork for such was laid, and mutual defense, technology and exploration agreements were made. The two groups already using their own ships to venture into other dimensions exchanged coordinates, and made plans for more exploration missions together.

Eventually, almost a year later, they took the 2014-era vessels back home - and found that they'd brought them back only days after their departure. Similarly, when they arrived home, they'd only been gone weeks. Later contact with those same worlds seemed to have time pass on a 1 to 1 basis, but something about those first missions (and many of their future first contact missions) resulted in an effect that Louis Nichols referred to as "visiting Narnia", where it was only after repeated contact that time passage would become synchronous.

The next voyage of the Dreamweaver would be to the world promised by Cindy, a normal Earth influenced by Karen; later missions would contact other dimensions that took completely other paths - but those are stories for another time.


End file.
